IIMC disappoints aspiring journalists with their complacency throughout the admission process

Every Indian student has a dream of studying in a government institution, for which they understand that just thinking about it wouldn’t be enough. And they are ready to take on the challenge. Lakhs of students find their way in such institutions by way of immense hard work and relentless studying hours out in with sweat and blood. In India, getting a seat in a government college or university is like a golden dream come true, which tonnes of students find as their aspirations and future dreams. So much that they’d do anything in their might to steer miles off of failure.

But what if one such institution fails the students?

That’s something that has very shockingly happened with an enormously well known Indian institution known by the name, Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC).

At 11 pm, on October 30th, thousands of students were left shocked when IIMC released the greatly awaited results of its entrance examination which was held on October 18, 2020. The reason for the utter heart-beat stopping reaction of students was the massively flawed list of names that IIMC claimed were the selected students for the various courses that the institute offers. And it would be apt to say that the students couldn’t sleep after that.

Pretty obviously and rightly so, students began to mention their grievances online on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, but their questions were left unanswered.

The next morning, that is on October 31st there wasn’t even the slightest of residue of the suspicious and unbelievable results that had shell-shocked the students the previous night.

Later on it was said that due to a technical error the results had been distorted and that the new results will be updated soon.

And they updated the results. But what they reportedly forgot to do was make it fair.

Now what is it that so drastically left the students shocked to their cores?

1. The results that were released both on the 30th and the 31st of October had redundancy in the names of students categorized in different castes. Meaning, that the name, say, PQR was present in the General category as well as the Scheduled Caste. Now how in the world is that supposed to be possible? Such redundancies were present across other categories as well, in the merit lists of all the IIMC exams of different courses.
2. The evaluation of marks seemed majorly suspicious. And the names of students whose results had been withheld were still present in the list.
3. The cut-off seemed unnaturally high. With over 4000 students who gave the exam, it was obvious that the competition was going to be cutthroat. But so much so that the cut off would be 98?
4. This brings us to our next point of the flawed and absolutely poorly planned, so called, “AI Proctored Exam”. The exam was conducted on SEB by NTA, which was supposed to be “SECURE”. But apparently wasn’t. The security of the browser was weak to such an extent that it could easily be switched off and turned back on without any loss of progress and no one being the wiser.
5. During the exam there wasn’t any kind of 360 degree surveillance to ensure properly fair conduct. And allegedly when hundreds of students got good marks that is above 96, they couldn’t all be selected, because well, a few scored a shining 100 on 100!

Now the students say, when exams like JEE and NEET which see massive crowds of students reaching over tens of lakhs, could be conducted offline by NTA, during the Corona times, why couldn’t an exam with just 4000+ entrants be conducted by the same NTA offline and in a fair manner, per se?

The questions that have bubbled up in the minds and guts of the thousands of students who has based their futures on the mere idea of being a part of IIMC are pretty genuine.

“A college of mass communication should have known better than to mess with the results of students aspiring to be journalists or efficient mass communicators for that matter. Now this is what true journalism is.” Said a student who was fed up with the flawed procedure of the examination and the disappointment that the final results caused.

This is a request to the Indian Institute of Mass Communication to face the music and answer for the errors and mistakes they have made.