Jan. 11: Calcutta University students taking Part III undergraduate exams will now be able to submit application forms online.

At present, blank forms for all undergraduate exams are sent to colleges before the exams. Students (BA, BSc and BCom) have to fill in the forms on the college premises. The college authorities send the forms back to the university.

Once the new system is in place, students would be able to download and submit forms online, a university official said.

Several institutes in the country follow the online way of submitting exam forms, an official of the university's controller of examination department said.

"We have taken the initiative to introduce the practice in our university as it would hasten the process of conducting major undergraduate exams involving a large number of students," the official said.

The university will start the online system with BA, BSc and BCom students taking honours and general exams, which are scheduled to be held from mid-April to mid-May.

The official said the online system would not only accelerate the examination process but would also help the university detect and rectify errors promptly.

Often, students misspell their names or surnames in the forms. "A software is being designed for the online system in such a way that these errors can be avoided or rectified before submitting the forms," he said.

At least 80,000 students are expected to take the Part III exams this year, the official said.

On Monday, the university sent a circular to all college principals regarding the online process that would start with this year's Part III exams.

The university plans to gradually introduce the online system for all undergraduate exams by 2018.

The university will organise a workshop on January 17 and 18 on its Nano Technology campus in Salt Lake for colleges on how to implement the online system.

The principal or teacher-in-charge of a college, along with two teachers and two non-teaching employees, will have to attend the workshop.

In Bengal, the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, to which all private engineering colleges are affiliated, introduced an online system to submit forms for all exams years ago.