Delhi High Court on Friday allowed Delhi University to conduct online open-book exams (OBE) for final-year students, in compliance with the directions passed by the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the court, including providing question paper in the mail as well as on the official portal. The online OBE is set to begin from Monday, August 10.

A single-judge bench of Justice Prathiba M Singh allowed the varsity to conduct online open-book exams on conditions that the question paper should be available on the portal as well as should be emailed to all the students appearing in the exams. The counsel for the Delhi University has agreed with the conditions. Wishing best luck to students for examination, Justice Singh asked Delhi University and University Grants Commission (UGC) to comply with the directions.

Initially, the university had announced that the online open-book exams would commence from July 1, but the date was later pushed to July 10, and subsequently to August 15. 

The decision comes a day after the high court observed that the final year students of the Delhi University “were not thoroughly prepared” to participate in the online open-book exams (OBE) proposed by the varsity.

Here are few important directions Delhi HC bench passed:

  • Question papers have to be available both on the portal and email ID of the students
  • Students to be given one hour extra for uploading the answer sheets
  • Auto-generated email shall be sent informing students that their answer sheets have been accepted
  • DU has to ensure that Centralised Email ID has enough capacity to hold responses from all the students

India’s COVID-19 tally reached 20,27,075 today, with 62,538 cases being reported in a day. Recoveries rose to 13,78,105 including 49,769 in the past 24 hours, according to the Union Health Ministry data. There are 6,07,384 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country presently while the recovery rate among COVID-19 patients has gone up to 67.62%.

This is the ninth consecutive day that COVID-19 cases have increased by more than 50,000. 886 patients succumbed to coronavirus infection in the past 24 hours, taking the overall death toll to 41,585.

According to the ICMR, a cumulative total of 2,27,24,134 samples have been tested till August 6 with 5,74,783 samples being tested on Thursday.