Delhi High Court on Wednesday observed that the students are not thoroughly prepared to take the Delhi University Open Book Examination. The Court made the observation after comparing the data of first and second phase of mock test data released by the University, reports Times of India.

A division bench of Justices Hima Kohli and Subramonium Prasad said that there is a clear indication that final year students who are supposed to take the OBE are not fully prepared to participate in the online exam that the university has proposed to conduct to evaluate these students.

The court has given the university 10 days to file an affidavit clarifying its position and the schedule of results for students who will be sitting for the OBE examination, adds the report. The next hearing on the matter will be on August 17.

The report says that the data revealed the number of students who participated in different phases of mock test along with the number of students who logged in and the number of paper submissions received. Though the second phase saw a slight number of increase in the number of students registering but a dip in number students who logged in and the number of students who submitted their papers.

A total number of 1.83 lakh students registered for the first phase of mock test with around 93.1 thousand logging in and 33.1 thousand paper submissions. The second phase witnessed 1.86 lakh students registering with around 75.5 thousand logins and 23.6 thousand paper submitted, according to the report.

The court also observed that the data for PWD category students is not better if not worse. The Court was hearing a plea filed by a physically disabled student highlighting the difficulties that students like him will face in taking the online exam,.

DU had said to a separate Bench of Justice Pratibha Singh that OBE is best option available for students to take the exam as having an email account is enough to take the exam and there is no need for high technological devices. The university said that conducting the exam in a hall would be difficult under the pandemic situation as maintaining physical distancing in a hall would be a challenge.

The University had scheduled to be conduct the OBE exam in the month of July which was postponed and is now scheduled to be conducted after August 15 with no specific date issued for the same.