All classes at IIT Kharagpur will be held offline from August 2, according to the calendar for the 2022-23 academic year that the institute issued earlier this week.
The calendar also stated that the examinations would be held offline.
In the previous semester (autumn semester that started in January), students had refused to write the end-semester exams offline because the classes were held online.
An IIT official said that this time they had mentioned at the very start of the academic year that the classes would be held offline so no one could object to writing the exams offline.
Students of the IIT had in April agitated in front of the director’s office demanding that exams be held online, following which the institute reversed its decision to hold exams offline.
The institute has also identified 500 resource-constrained second-semester BTech students who will be called to the campus from May 14 so they can attend online classes from WiFi-enabled hostels.
They, too, will attend offline classes from August 2 once they are promoted to the second year.
The academic calendar says at the very start that all academic activities, except those for the first-year students, will be held offline.
Apart from the autumn semester that spans from August to December, the notice mentions that the mid-semester and end-semester exams of the spring semester, which continues from January to June, will be held offline as well.
On March 8, the institute had asked all students to come to the campus by March 31 so they could write the end-semester exams offline in April.
The teachers had said that conducting end-semester exams offline was a must to ensure the sanctity of the examination process.
After the students had erupted in protests, the authorities had on March 22 reversed its decision on offline exams.
The students were told that they could choose between online and offline mode and all of them opted to write the exams online.
“This academic calendar maintains a uniformity between the mode of classes and the mode of exams. So we hope no one would have any objection to writing the exams offline,” said an IIT Kharagpur official.
The academic calendar says classes for the second-year undergraduate students may be held on Saturdays, too, during the autumn semester “to cover the deficit of 10 class days”.
The deficit resulted from their delayed admission last year — in November - because of the pandemic.
The institute had in April asked teachers to draw up a list of “genuinely resource-constrained” students from the 2021 batch so they could be brought to the campus at the earliest to attend online classes from hostels.
“Five-hundred students have been identified and they will be brought to the campus during a slot from May 14 to 25,” said Dhrubajyoti Sen, dean of students.
The official said 20 to 25 first-year students had written to the dean of students about connectivity problems they were facing at home.
