Mumbai: While the Vile Parle campus of NMIMS has been abuzz with crowds of parents and students protesting the institute’s ‘rigid’ assessment policy, the pass percentage has been worse off at the Navi Mumbai campus of the renowned business school.
Compared to the main Mumbai campus, the Navi Mumbai branch has recorded a larger number of students failing in their first and second year of B.Com (Hons) at NMIMS’ Anil Surendra Modi School of Commerce. According to figures accessed by The FPJ, and verified by NMIMS, 28 of the total 76 SY B.Com students have been asked to repeat the year after failing the mid-term examinations while 56 students failed in an FY B.Com class of 167 students admitted.
The assessment policy at NMIMS allowed students to appear for one retest and one revaluation even after which a large chunk of the students have been asked to repeat the year or drop out. “The syllabus taught to us was not what was asked in the question papers, which are set by the NMIMS main campus,” alleges a second-year B.Com (Hons) student.
The relatively new B-school campus launched the B.Com (Hons) course in the academic year 2019-2020, right before the pandemic, making the current cohort the first fully offline batch at the college. As per the institute, the professors have also conducted several remedial classes for the current batches but the parents continue to allege that the recruited faculty is incompetent. “Many students chose to skip the remedial lectures as they were taken by the professors who were unable to solve the doubts earlier. The campus does not even have its own dean to communicate with the Mumbai campus,” said a parent who previously protested at the NMIMS Mumbai campus.
A group of 120 parents recently penned a letter to the Union Higher Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, alongside UGC officials and the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Eknath Shinde. While raising concerns against the evaluation policy at the management institute, the letter also drew attention to the lapses by the faculty.
Addressing the allegations raised by the group, NMIMS officials stated, “Students did not raise any complaint as regards questions being out of syllabus or not taught during or immediately after the examination. Students appeared at regular examinations and thereafter one re-examination. At no point in time did anyone raise any issue. These students have given good feedback to the faculty members during the feedback session (teaching methodology, coverage/ depth of syllabus covered, course design and its effectiveness, etc.). The students are raising issues only after availing two chances of examinations and also after completing the revaluation process. Further, opinion from the teachers concerned was sought when the students raised these queries in the first week of May 2023.”
