Over 50 per cent ITI students fail exams

With some colleges registering failure rates of up to 80 to 85 per cent, students and principals blamed the dismal performance on a series of changes in the exam and evaluation patterns

Results always keep students on tenterhooks, but the anxiety reached new heights on Tuesday, when it was revealed that more than half the students at Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) across the state had failed their semester examinations.

The Industrial Training Institute (ITI) is amongst several others that were in for a rude shock yesterday, when they learned about the semester exam results. Pic/Satayjit Desai

In some colleges, the failure rate rose to a staggering 80 to 85 per cent.

Students and principals of these colleges have blamed their dismal performance on major changes in the examination and evaluation patterns recently introduced by the Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGE&T) in New Delhi. According to the institute heads (who have withheld their names), the exams were held once a year until last year, and were only recently rescheduled to be held every semester.

“We were harrowed with the last minute changes in our exam schedule anyway, and to make matters worse, even the paper pattern had changed,” said a student at Bombay ITI, Byculla. While authorities at the institute refused to talk about the results, students highlighted that almost 80 per cent of their batch had failed the second semester exams. “We’ll end up losing an entire year if the authorities don’t take this matter seriously,” said the students.

Stating that 200 from the batch of 250 students had failed at Borivli ITI, the principal of the institute said, “The directorate recently introduced a new marking system which gives negative marking to students which seems to have been the main problem,” said the principal of Borivli ITI.

Others blamed the periodic changes in the exam pattern and curriculum. A spokesperson for Fr Agnel Technical Institute, Vashi, said that even the syllabus has shifted focus from practical-based assessment to more emphasis on theory, defeating the purpose of the course. “We found out that many questions asked in the paper were not even part of the syllabus,” he added.

Taking the complaints that came from students after the exams into consideration, authorities from various technical institutes in the city had also written to the DGE&T in September.

The DGE&T could not be reached for comment despite this newspaper’s attempts to contact the authority.

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