The students in Tamil Nadu who are in their final semesters are going to appear for their exams online, for the first time owing to the COVID-19 outbreak and the universities in the state had decided to conduct the final semester exams by September 30. 

On Thursday, the Tamil Nadu Higher Education Department had convened a meeting of vice-chancellors of the varsities on conducting the final semester exams. During the meeting, the vice-chancellors had decided to conduct the final semester exams online and it has been agreed to complete the exams by the end of this month. 

It has been the first time that the students who are in the final semesters are pushed to the modality of appearing to exams online while the government had already canceled the exams for the rest of the students who are not in their final semesters. With deciding to conduct the exams online, the universities are given with instructions to prepare questions and decide the platforms to conduct the exams. 

According to reports, the universities are asked to decrease the duration of the exam. While students are usually given three hours to write exams, the varsities are now asked to reduce the timings to one hour or one and a half hours. Anna University has been planning multi-choice questions while other universities are planning to use the mode of descriptive type questions. 

The reports said that the universities will be sending questions to the students and they need to write the answers by using a pen and paper after which they would have to upload the answer sheets for evaluation. Colleges would be instructed to open their facilities for students who are not able to upload their answer scripts. 

Anna University had announced that it would conduct the final-semester exams for undergraduate and postgraduate students from September 22 to 29 through online. The varsity had issued a circular in which it had stated that the students can appear for the examination from their home using devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones with the internet, camera, and microphone facilities.

The university further stated that the question will be of multiple-choice based and it has added that it also plans to arrange mock tests for students so that they would prepare for the online exams. However, Madras University hasn't decided on the duration of the exam and the platform and the varsity said that the details will be finalized in the next few days after discussions.