Students have been protesting on the streets of Lahore for the last few weeks with several demands. Media coverage of the protests has brought to the fore two key demands.

The first demand is for a refund of at least half the tuition fee for the previous semester. Their argument is that online classes were poorly organised and conducted.

There is no doubt that the experience of online classes has been very uneven and mostly sub-standard in many universities. The first lockdown in the spring was sudden and did not allow for any preparation and so the difficulties students had to endure then were to be expected. University, college and school professors and teachers, many of whom were clearly not experienced computer users, had to improvise with what they had at home.

Bad cameras, bad microphones made content hard to follow and unengaging. Unfamiliarity and hastily arranged video conferencing software that were poor choices for conducting classrooms invited chaos in some online classrooms. For a good experience, video conferencing requires all participants to have stable and fast internet connections, the kind you get with fibre-to-home connections. Unfortunately, the number of cities in Pakistan with that kind of connectivity can be counted on fingers.

Universities expected their professors to conduct classes according to their regular schedule, but from their homes without the necessary tools. At many institutions, faculty members are just ‘expected’ to have a laptop computer, to run their class presentations from. This makes university faculty the last profession that is expected to pay for their essential work tools from their own pockets. Even in 2020, the most universities will provide is a clunky desktop for the office and a greasy, shared computer in classrooms.

Some of the footage of Pakistani online classes that emerged was truly depressing. Professors were conducting their classes on small whiteboards in front of bad webcams. An inexpensive fix for classes ordinarily conducted on black/whiteboards is for universities to provide faculty with pen input tablets to share notes on a virtual, on-screen whiteboard.

One of the most highly-ranked Pakistani public universities in the capital was able to arrange funds to establish a riding stable, a swimming pool and other facilities. Yet, when it came time to provide its faculty with the basic necessities for teaching online, all it could manage was offer faculty interest-free loans for them to buy whatever tools they needed for work, to be recovered from deductions from their salaries.

I can only imagine what must have happened at colleges and universities further down-list, where the use of computers by faculty in classrooms and students at home is still not part of their academic culture. Delivery of an acceptable quality of online teaching requires appropriate hardware, software and connectivity by faculty and students. Put simply, most universities badly let down students and faculty in the way they let online classes be conducted. Nevertheless, whether it is practical to demand universities refund students half their tuition fee is doubtful. While universities may have saved on utility bills, the bulk of their expenses go into salaries, which remained unchanged.

The protesting students’ second demand is for exams to be conducted online. One slogan whose variations were seen on picket signs is “Classes on Zoom - Exams in rooms?” Even after listening to multiple student representatives elaborate on this point, the morphing multitude of reasons given to justify this demand remain far from clear.

One claim is that having exams on campus will put students at risk of Covid infection. A look out the window lets us see that, Covid or no-Covid, most people are going about their normal lives in Pakistan. With all restaurants and entertainment venues doing business as usual, social gatherings proceeding unabated and their own ongoing student protests, the additional risk of infection from having an exam in a classroom is negligible.

Conducting exams online requires appropriate software, usually a learning management system (LMS), which the HEC and universities were still exploring in the summer. I talked to a faculty member at a university in the Middle East where they have also had online exams in the fall. Although they already had a well-established LMS deployed pre-Covid, and both faculty and students had better devices and connectivity, there were a myriad of problems and cheating was rampant. Online exams also require that students have a reliable internet connection for the duration of the exam. We already know that the need for internet connectivity has been a major hurdle to attending classes for many students. That problem will remain as it is. What will be the policy when a student gets disconnected during the exam? Several students have been depending on their phones to attend online classes. For many subjects, attempting a serious exam, giving long answers to questions will require extensive typing, that is, a computer. Do all students have access to a computer? Can they type fast enough? What about subjects like mathematics that use a lot of symbols not found on the keyboard?

Others make a nebulous claim for ‘fairness’. The explanations I have heard so far make no sense and sound like doublespeak that boils down to a permission to cheat. Take-home exams have long been used at US colleges. These are open-ended or require a degree of creativity that clearly reflect individual students’ performance and makes it easy/ easier to catch cases of plagiarism. However, such an approach is unlikely to work in a country where students can often be seen taking to the streets, claiming ‘out-of-course’ questions, when given an exam question that cannot be found in the exact same form in class notes or textbook.

Ensuring fairness in common online exams is very difficult. For example, the internet-based version of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) that international students need to take for admissions in the US can now be taken from home. However, it requires test takers to install special software that lets exam proctors monitor test takers through the camera, listen in through the microphone and see everything happening on the screen. It also requires test-takers to be alone in a room (which they have to give a tour of before the exam) and must place a large mirror behind them that lets proctors see test-takers’ hands and desk during the test. The cost of this proctoring service and the test itself has inflated its price tag to roughly $240, more than Rs 38,000.

Can we expect students to refrain from collaborating and count on them to submit their own work in the online exams they demand? Are they prepared for exams with the kind of ‘conceptual’ exam questions that require out-of-the-box thinking their representatives are asking for? Can we expect universities, who have proven themselves incapable of providing for the conduct of engaging online classes, to ensure fair, at-home exams? Certainly, the answer to all these questions is an emphatic ‘no.’

The writer is an independent education researcher and consultant. She has a PhD in education from Michigan State University. She can be reached at arazzaque@gmail.com