Mumbai: Graduation has become an uncertain affair for thousands of students in the last leg of their Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia and Mass Communication (BAMMC) course at Mumbai University (MU) affiliated colleges.
These third-year media students were supposed to start their semester VI exams on April 12, 2023, until MU postponed the test indefinitely just a day before the first paper. The new exam dates, which are not yet announced, stand to disrupt the plans of several students who plan to apply for a master’s degree after graduation.
“Like many of my peers, I plan on getting into an MBA course, for which my Common Admission Test(CAT) tutorials begin in May. College exams, in all likelihood, will clash with the classes now that there is a delay in MU’s timetable,” said Hrishikesh Thakur, a third-year student from a MU affiliated in Juhu.
The postponement comes in as the University of Mumbai has still not produced the results of its previous (semester V) BAMMC exams, which were held in December 2022. This delay in releasing student documents has put many foreign education dreams in a logjam.
“I have secured conditional admission for an Advertising course at the University of Leeds in the UK. I have to hand in all my mark sheets by June if I wish to freeze the admission. This looks very unlikely since we don’t even have our semester V scores,” said a BAMMC student from Navi Mumbai.
The dawdling processes at MU have also hindered the morale of many students who took their first offline college exam in semester V, owing to a two-year gap caused by the pandemic.
“We don’t know how we performed in our first offline exam and have no time to analyse what went right or wrong. How do we know whether our semester VI preparation is moving in the right direction without seeing our previous results?” asks Khushi Wankhade, a third-year student from SIES Nerul.
This problem, however, does not afflict those autonomous colleges who have already finished taking their BAMMC examinations and await results. The students from these autonomous colleges, who will graduate before the rest, will get the first shot at the job market after college. Now, MU students are worried about missing their chance of landing a job since their peers have an undue advantage.
“Media companies looking to hire will go for students who have already finished their exams while we are still waiting for ours to start. Those among us who have already received pre-placement offers cannot commit to a starting date, thanks to the uncertainty around our exam,” said a third-year student from the Usha Pravin Gandhi College of Arts, Science, and Commerce.
Talking to The FPJ, an official from Mumbai University stated that the semester V BAMMC papers have been assessed, and the varsity is now processing these results online. “We are trying to be thorough with the processing to ensure that no student is miscounted or gets the wrong results. Once the previous results are out, exam dates and timetable for the new exam will be announced promptly,” said the MU official.
