This is blatantly illegal. There is no provision for exam vivas in the exam rules, not have any guidelines been issued about how it would work.

Beautiful PR stunt

This is a great PR stunt by the NLSIU administration. The only focus of the Sudhir Krishnaswamy admin has been to ensure the timely running of law school, in doing the same there has been an utter disregard for the mental health of students or concern for the situations they find themselves in during the pandemic. Please ask students of NLSIU about how things really are. The past few months have revealed horror story after horror story on our batch groups. Please don not fall for this propoganda!

What a joke!! The discretion to have a 6 hour paper has been given to teachers and I highly doubt anyone will set an 8 hour paper. The first set of exams took place, it was a proper six hour marathon. In addition to this, almost every student has some back to back exams, so that is a clear lie. Apart from that, when these end terms end on 15, the VC has scheduled repeat exams for past trim from 17 June, giving us less than 48 hrs to prepare for this. Once these repeat exams are finished, he intends to conduct the repeat exams for this set of end terms as well around 25 June. So three entire set of exams this guy has scheduled in 4 weeks, I wonder why legallyindia wasn't told about this. Mostly cuz this is inhumane, feels like modiji saying everything is fine in Kashmir when its clearly not. Contact some students anonymously to know for yourself how so much shit has been dumped on us in the name of academic rigour in the midst of a pandemic.

Luckily, for us, the pandemic and struggles of people from the underprivileged background is a joke. With the help of online resources, we have been able to deliver the academic schedule to the dot, cause we are a nation which has high quality stable internet around every corner.

When it comes to the end semester examinations, we've been able to develop a very efficient mechanism for evaluation, such that the students are able to sit in front of their computers and devices for 6-8 hours. They are merely expected to attempt a fairly easy question paper which would only take round about 6 hrs to complete, oops "3 hrs",in the normal circumstances.
But as we live in a precarious situation, they are given enough time of 8 hrs, as some people have to see to the daily chores like surviving themselves, or like power cuts and what not (what are power cuts tho).

Anyway, number 1 laaa college in india, we put the interests of the students first, always!

Complete propganda. Students are being made to write end terms, last trimester's repeats and this trimester's repeats all in a matter of 24 days. Please seek the official opinion of the Student body before pushing some hogwash.

From the VC's words, it appears that he views the mere 4 day delay in the academic schedule as an "achievement". He conveniently ignores that this "achievement" came at the cost of the mental health of the student, faculty and administrative staff, all of whom were forced to adhere to "usual" academic standards. A certain professor (who is a senior citizen and has been facing health issues for the last 2 years) was asked to come to the college campus on everyday that he had to take an online class. It is clear that the VC wishes to receive personal praise for "his efforts" to avoid "disruption" to the schedule.

He has consistently avoided direct dialogue with the student body despite several such demands. Furthermore, he has removed the access of the student body to mail the faculty under the guise of "abuse of mail privileges in the past". The timing of this change of policy is conspicuous, especially at a time when there is a NEED for greater communication, not less in a regime of online classes and exams.

During his last meeting with the elected class representatives of each UG programme batch (which was almost a month ago), the students put forth the concern that due to issues of access to internet & private spaces, a 24hr slot would accommodate these concerns. He responded that a 12hr duration was reasonable. The students conceded that 12hrs might suffice, although some concerns remained unaddressed. But when the exam policy was released to the students, it came as a shock that the duration of exams were 6hr/8hrs as per the discretion of the professor. The students were given ONLY ONE day to respond to this policy. It must be noted that the policy was released to the students at a time when they were swamped with paper submissions for their courses.

Despite this short timeframe, the students responded with the comments and concerns regarding the exam policy. The final exam policy was supposed to be released within a day of receiving student comments, but the final policy was forwarded to the students after 2 days. It was released the day before the paper submission deadlines. The policy did not address a single concern raised by the students. The final policy mirrored the draft policy word-to-word except for 1 provision.

The VC further assured the students that the paper would not take more than 3hrs to complete (as is the case in regular examinations). But, from the examinations conducted for different courses today (which is the first day of examinations), the questions remained demanding and time-consuming inspite of it being an "open-book" exam. Students were frantically typing for the entire 6hrs to complete the paper. If today is anything to go by, it seems apparent that the faculty has been asked to set tough (effectively lengthy and time-consuming) papers in the light of the exam duration being 6/8hrs. This fails to capture any of the issues of access that were raised by the students.

It is frustrating to see an alumnus of the college running the college in a manner that is adding to physical and mental pressures to the faculty and students, at a time when educational institutions should help in alleviating such stress.

Why is this news exactly? NLSIU isn't the first law school to have opted for online exams in this year. Nor are they thinking of any exceptional strategy. The methods mentioned appear to be pretty standard and the plagiarism check or the grilling by the teacher is frankly unlikely to protect against unfair means adopted by enterprising students.

NLSIU and JGLS have suddenly gone on a massive PR spree: QS rankings, online learning, virtue signalling etc. While JGLS has always does PR, I wonder what NLSIU's agenda is. Is Sudhir lobbying for National Importance status or private sector funds? Or just an image makeover for NLSIU?

What a truckload of misrepresented facts. The VC has been nothing but apathetic during the course of the trimester and shoved exams down the throat of students even after they raised issues of structural difficulties.

Legally India should also reach out to students on this issue and refrain from whitewashing the NLSIU administration.

Insider gossip!

Supreme court judges have refused to attend nlsiu's convocation. Decision is already taken to have an online convocation this year.

from these comments it seems Mr. Sudhir has chose to ignore the problems faced by his students and blindly implemented policies without thinking about the mental pressure on his students, especially in such difficult times.
6 Hours examination? Are you serious?
Sad to see Mr. Sudhir Krishnaswamy focussing more on CV Building than his full-time job as VC of NLSIU.

Exorbitant amount of mental agony among the students has been completely skipped out from the one point perspective piece of information highlighted by the respective article. The only carry away out of this article must be a non-conformist perception that the information available in the society is a reflection of what the ruling class, in our case the beloved Vice Chancellor wants to showcase.

There are several unanswered mails of concern which the administration should have received priority over this. The information which is being concealed by this article, if brought out in the open will address sufficient problems with respect to inequality of access and rising intolerance of the student body against the unsympathetic actions of administration.

The article has also formidably concealed feelings of apathy exercised by some section of faculty members in their ability to contemplate that the current situation does not give rise to any source of unnatural stress for the students.

Lastly, the article also teaches a great thing about how exclusive and elitist the admin has to be in order to push for application of fragile values of academic rigour and uniformity. It fails to depict a contemporary image that the college is more representative and boasts a greater diversity than it did during the Vice Chancellor's days as a student in this college.

Current students are understandably under exam-induced stress at the moment. So many of the comments in this thread are reflective of their immediate anxieties. However, this is the right call for the institution. Allowing open-book online exams with durations between 6 hours-8 hours is a reasonable solution in these circumstances. This is a normal practice in many law schools over the world and it is about time that NLSIU students get accustomed to it. Ideally, the students should not be tested on rote-memory and should instead be asked to respond to comprehension-based exercises or questions that require careful conceptual analysis. Of course, Sudhir Krishnaswamy should be mindful about the interests of students who may be in remote/rural locations with poor internet connectivity or frequent interruptions in electricity supply. There could also be a few students who are living in the COVID-19 containment zones and some might be in Kashmir with only 2G networks. In such cases, flexibility should be shown to allow the affected students to write the exams at a later date.

The COVID-19 situation will not ease out until the development of a vaccine and its widespread distribution. So until then, Universities need to adapt and run their academic activities online. This transition is not a smooth one for any institution and there will invariably be concerns about the discriminatory impact on students from marginalised communities. The institution must provide safety nets by paying for internet connections and providing laptops to students who do not have the means to do so.

In the present circumstances, holding online exams is a much better solution than not holding exams at all. Unfortunately, college administrators at many other NLUs have succumbed to student pressure. For instance, students from NALSAR have told me that their administration has decided to pass students based on marks in mid-semester exams (held in end-February) and project assignments. Despite such a student-friendly measure, some NALSAR are still complaining about the required assignment deadlines even though they were given time till May 31 with online classes having finished in end-April. That is one extra month to complete two assignments.

In this context, it is quite disappointing to see some of the comments made by current students at both institutions, where are otherwise considered to be the best law colleges in India. College life should teach you to handle the pressure of planning for multiple tasks and working hard. Just do your best with the exams and things will be alright. Your future employers will respect the fact that you performed your duties as students during such an exceptional period.

The people who are supporting this mode of exam are those who know that it would allow them to cheat with impunity.

LI is censoring comments blaming a certain professor for anti-Sudhir comments.

The desperation of the bottom rankers is hilarious. Suddenly everyone becomes a Kashmiri affected by militancy or a Bengali affected by the cyclone!

Kids,

This is the best training you'll have if you want to enter law firms. You'll see your partner tell the client that they'll give it in 2 days, so you'll think you have time to breathe but your partner will ask you to give it by 8pm the same day. So you'll have to finish a memo in 6 hours for it to sit in your partner's inbox for a whole 24 hours and then face a viva on it 8pm next day when your partner opens the file for the first time and spend all night on day 2 researching on supplemental questions that your partner thinks of then. Tada!

Meanwhile all NALSAR students reading the comments - thank god for Fuzzy

Re Harvard of the East, the Asian law schools listed below are ranked ahead of NLSIU in QS: 2 from Singapore, 3 from HK, 4 from Japan, 4 from South Korea, 8 from China, 2 from Taiwan, 1 from Malaysia.

National University of Singapore, Singapore (12)
Hong Kong University, Hong Kong (19)
Tokyo University, Japan (20)
Peking University, China (23)
Tsinghua University, China (27)
Seoul National University, South Korea (38)
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (43)
National Taiwan University, Taiwan (49)
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (51-100)
Fudan University, China (51-100)
Korea University, South Korea (51-100)
Kyoto University, Japan (51-100)
Renmin University, China (51-100)
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (51-100)
University of Malaya, Malaysia (51-100)
Waseda University, Japan (51-100)
Wuhan University, China (51-100)
Yonsei University, South Korea (51-100)
Zheijang University, China (51-100)
China University of Political Science and Law, China (101-150)
National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan(101-150)
Osaka University, Japan (101-150)
Singapore Management University, Singapore (101-150)
Sungkyunkwan University,South Korea (101-150)

www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2020/law-legal-studies

It is wrong to blame Professor Menon for the Harvard of the East title (as Guest 51 is doing). Menon has said in an article that it was the Bar Council of India which coined the term. I quote: "In 1985, I was offered the job of setting up what the Council called "the Harvard of the East", a model institution to revolutionise legal education..."

If you want to blame someone blame Venkata Rao, who made this statement to LI in 2009: "Bangalore law school is the Harvard of the East - we will work continuously to make people say that Harvard is the Bangalore of the West."
www.legallyindia.com/lawschools/bangalore-law-school-takes-on-world-with-good-advice-20090522-022

Also blame LI, for constantly hyping NLSIU at the expense of other law schools and not challenging Rao.Till date LI has never done a comparison of faculty quality at NLSIU versus elsewhere and also stopped the placement rankings once NLSIU weakened.

The way some people are accusing us of lying and being just plain lazy is sickening. Some of the people also do not believe that we are actually NLS students. Last few months have been the most stressful of my life. There are people who are facing mental health issues- [...]. And the administration has shown zero concern. I am attaching one picture as evidence and you are free to judge our beloved vice chancellor.
We raised some concerns more than a week ago on a Friday. He replied back telling us that he will reply to them over the weekend. We kept waiting the entire day.

We didn't recieve any reply. Few people thought that he may have meant next weekend and we waited till the next weekend. But the reply never came.



[Ed: Names redacted from image]

Sudhir will only stop this phenomenally 'successful, fluid and holsitic' switch over to the new model in this pandemic [...] The publically accessible NLS student mental health survey conducted by quirk recently seems to have had no bearing at all in the policy design. The third years yesterday underwent a gruesome exam which required them to literally type for 6 hours like a maniac, no matter which level of 'merit' you operate on.