Several GLC Mumbai students are stuck with allegedly wrong results to their end semester examinations, after the Mumbai University’s severely disorganised attempt at going digital with its examination process for all Mumbai University-affiliated law and other colleges this year.

GLC yesterday finally declared the full results for its LLB course and, according to PTI, this amounts to a month’s delay from the first officially announced date for result declaration.

It is understood that the delay will cause at least two students holding Harvard University LLM offers to defer their entry to the elite US college by a year.

According to sources in the law school, several students have been wrongly marked absent in the result sheet, even though they were present and appeared for the exam on the designated date. Several students have also been failed in what they suspect to be erroneous assessment of their papers, and have therefore applied for re-evaluation.

The college authorities have allegedly admitted to scanning errors in the evaluation process, such as missing out on marking supplementary answer sheets, GLC students told us.

Out of 49 final year students whose results for the semester 9 LLB papers were declared on GLC’s website, 10 were marked absent and 10 were marked as failing when we accessed the results at the time of going to press.

“So many people have been marked as absent in their results when they clearly appeared for the paper. It is not clear whether the person’s paper hasn’t been assessed, or the paper itself has been misplaced by the University,” commented one student who had appeared along with the students who were allegedly wrongly marked absent.

GLC acting principal Ajay Nathani was not reachable for comment by phone at the time of going to press.

Mumbai University’s examiners had learned to digitally assess answer sheets in a day-long training session this year, as reported by Hindustan Times.

That HT report explained the process as follows:

According to a circular released by the university, answer papers will be scanned from May 4. Since it will take some time to scan more than 20 lakh answer sheets, MU officials hope to start the process by next week. As of now 142 assessment centres have been recognised by the MU for digital assessment and it has also invited other colleges with a capacity of more than 50 computers in their labs to register as micro-centres. Under the new system, papers will be scanned and put up on a software on the computer screen. Teachers will mark them on the screen and upload the marks on a common system.

If sheets are assessed manually, the assessment should begin within three days after the exam is conducted, and results have to be announced within 45 days. This year, assessments which should have start in the last week of March have not yet begun. Keeping in mind the four-week delay, students fear that results are likely to get affected