Candidates who appeared for the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) in Ahmedabad on Friday said that though the tests went well, without any major technical glitches, getting to the exam centre was a big hassle, especially with the rains.
Rai University at Saroda, which is 30 km away from Ahmedabad city, was a CUET exam centre on Friday. “Transportation is the biggest issue here. It takes over one hour to reach the centre,” said Jitendra Punjabi (48), whose child Teenu (17) appeared for the exam at Rai University in the first slot. “First of all they allotted the centres at the last moment. On top of that, we had to face the unpredictable rains in the city. We had to take an auto and a state transport bus to reach the centre,” he added.
Sudhir Kumar (49), whose son Siddhant (17) also appeared for CUET at the Rai University centre, echoed Punjabi’s words. “I hope they change the centre for the next exam on July 19. If not, we have to start at 5 in the morning to be at the centre before time. Transportation is definitely an issue here, one of my son’s friends could not make it as he had no transport to come here,” Kumar said.
Most aspirants said the tests were easy and there were no major glitches.
“I had four papers today. Computer Science, Maths, General Test and English. The remaining ones, Physics and Chemistry, are in the next slot in August. I have been lucky. The slots are just allotted to us randomly and the centres allotted too late. I have to travel 60 km from Gandhinagar to get here,” said Harshvardhan Singh (18). “The paper was easy and everything was from the syllabus. However, the maths paper was lengthy, “ he added.
Sanghvi Tailor, who appeared for the CUET in the morning slot, also found the test easy. “Hardly anything was outside NCERT (syllabus). There was no technical glitch and the test started on time. The paper went well for me. I appeared for History, English, Sociology and the General Test. I really do not know which universities or colleges I am aiming for as the CBSE results have not been declared yet,” Sanghvi said.
Pawan Singh, a student who appeared in the second slot of CUET scheduled at 3 pm, pointed out that there was a discrepancy in reporting times. “My reporting time is at 1 pm, but many have been given reporting times like 1.20 pm. This is just random,” he said.
In the evening slot too, most students found no technical glitches and reported that the paper was easy. “There was no technical glitch per se, but for half of the students, the starting page did not show their chosen subjects. But as one moved to the next page by pressing ‘Continue’, the chosen subjects automatically appeared,” Adwait Shah (17) said. “My major complaint is that I had my exam from 3 pm to 4.30 pm as I had two subjects but I had to wait for the others who were probably appearing for more subjects,” said Shah.
Shah only appeared for Accountancy and Economics, the test for the remaining subjects is scheduled for August 17.
Lakshita Barot and Heta Gadvi, who are aspiring to get admissions in MS University, Vadodara, said they were appearing for the exam “for the experience”. “We are appearing for History, Geography, Political Science and Hindi. There is no study material available for our subjects, like for Science and Commerce. At first, we were not sure whether the university we were interested in is included in this scheme of exam, but it is not. We are giving it just for experience,” they said.
Sanjeev Bhardwaj, administration head of Rai University, said that 56 out of 120 candidates appeared for CUET in the morning slot at the centre, and 62 of 120 in the second slot.
“We only got a confirmation mail on Wednesday (July 12) evening that our university is allotted as the centre for CUET. This remains a centre for July 16, 19 and 20 as well. First, we had declined conducting the exam. This was till yesterday night. This was because there were no servers, jammers given to us till around 1 am in the night,” said Lalit Adhikari, registrar at Rai University.
“The mail said 120 computers, but we had kept 150 for the exam, in case there was some technical issue during the exam. At a time, only 80 of them were in use. The IT team from their (National Testing Agency) side, Bangalore-based firm IT firm Acuity, only came this morning. There were no guidelines, no servers , no jammers, no layout was provided to us, except that the exam needs to be conducted. We also had trouble deploying the staff for the test today,” added Bhardwaj.
Adhikari said that these “technical issues” were why the university was reluctant to hold the test. “We are one of the few universities which fulfil the requirement of having computers at our disposal in such large numbers. We have the infrastructure to conduct the exam but we needed some staff to handle…it was a bit difficult,” he added.
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