IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical for MSCGG: Remote Sensing Techniques Lab, Day Plan and Papers

IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical in the last MSCGG semester

MGGL-005 is the last of the five MSCGG practicals. Semester four pairs it with MGG-012 Introduction to Remote Sensing, one MGGE elective and the 8-credit MGGP-001 project. The current course book is the February 2026 print (ISBN 978-93-6106-574-3).

At our desk, the lab side of a programme worries students far more than the theory papers, and learners who clear their term-end theory without trouble can still get stuck here. For MSCGG, MGGL-005 is that last lab hurdle, and the prospectus lists it as compulsory.

Many learners tell us they noticed the practical component only late in the session. MGGL-005 sits beside MGG-012 in the semester four table of the prospectus, so it belongs in the plan from the first week of that semester.

70 percent of 28 lab sessions: the MGGL-005 attendance rule

For the IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical, the course introduction itself sets the attendance line. Attendance is mandatory, and you need at least 70 percent of the scheduled laboratory counselling sessions, which the book counts as 14 days or 28 sessions of lab counselling for MGGL-005 in each admission cycle. The Common Prospectus adds the general rule: practical sessions run at designated institutions, the Learner Support Centre gives the schedule, and attendance at practical sessions is compulsory.

The book also asks you to finish the course within the year of registration where possible, so watch for the MSCGG practical schedule from your Regional Centre or study centre and keep the fortnight free. The guided exercises happen in these practical counselling sessions.

Students who come to us are mostly working, running a household, or both. Theory counselling is usually optional, practical sessions generally are not, and missed lab days often mean no practical exam and a lost session. The MGGL-005 book makes attendance mandatory and sets the minimum given above.

We often see learners follow a friend at another study centre and then find that their own centre runs attendance or hand-in differently. For MGGL-005, hold on to the course book’s own rule: complete the exercises and submit them to the Academic Counsellor or Program In-Charge at your designated study centre.

Practical classes run in fixed blocks, often full days over several dates, sometimes at a distant centre, and batch lists usually go up on Regional Centre or study centre websites. Learners who stop checking miss their slot and wait a cycle. As a general rule the prospectus says the Learner Support Centre provides the schedule for practical sessions, so watch there for the MGGL-005 dates.

What the MGGL-005 practical record has to show

The IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical record is built from the “Exercise: Make It Yourself” tasks printed at the end of each of the 29 exercises, 41 numbered tasks from 1.1 to 29.1. Exercises 3 to 14 and 23 to 29 say to complete them for your practical record, allow the dataset given at your study centre, and send the record to the academic counsellor or lab instructor for evaluation; the introduction names the Academic Counsellor or Program In-Charge. Day 13’s second session is kept for Preparation and Finalization of Practical Records.

Several tasks ask for writing as well as a map. Task 5.1 asks you to describe the spectral profile of at least three land cover types, 11.3 asks you to record the changes after a logarithmic stretch on two data sets, 12.1 asks for the key differences between NDVI, NDWI and NDBI, and 12.2 asks you to interpret the output maps. The book prints no cover format, page order, binding rule or certificate for the record, so the counsellor’s instruction at your own centre fills those gaps.

In our experience, the written record is where marks slip away most, and it is also the part easiest to fix. The MGGL-005 record is built task by task from the Make It Yourself sections and finalised in the second session of Day 13.

A frequent weak entry repeats the action, such as “loaded the image and ran the tool”, line after line, when evaluators look for each entry to link what was done with a concept or method from the course. MGGL-005 tasks 5.1 and 12.2 ask for that link in plain words: describe the profiles, interpret the index maps.

We see lab records with observation tables missing, calculations left half done, graphs without labels and no line on precautions or sources of error. In MGGL-005 the likely places are the band histograms of Exercise 4, the spectral profiles of Exercise 5 and the error matrix of Exercise 22.

IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical evaluation on Day 14

The IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical day plan prints Day 14 as Evaluation/Practical Examination and Viva-Voce. The course introduction explains the weighting behind it: each experiment is evaluated, the guided laboratory exercises carry 70 percent of the weightage, and the remaining 30 percent goes to unguided experiments that you perform at the end of the course. For that reason the book calls completing all the experiments essential.

The MGGL-005 term-end practical papers run 3 hours for 50 marks, any five questions. The book does not say how its guided and unguided weightage maps onto that paper, so ask your Academic Counsellor how your centre runs Day 14.

Many learners ask us whether a viva applies to their course. For MGGL-005 the course book settles it: Day 14 is printed as the practical examination and viva-voce together.

A viva is easy to dismiss as a formality, yet it usually carries real weight: a neat file scores poorly when its owner cannot explain the aim, method or result, and those who did the work answer most confidently. On MGGL-005 the viva-voce follows 13 days of your own lab work.

Ready-made practical files circulate online, and some get handed in with nothing altered except the student’s name and enrolment number. When several learners at one centre submit identical work, it stands out, and the MGGL-005 viva-voce on Day 14 exposes anyone who cannot explain the maps in their own record.

Exercise 16 still needs tracing paper and a field check

One part of the IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical is done by hand. Exercise 16, Visual Interpretation of Image-II, lists a tracing table, colour pens or pencils, transparent or butter paper, clips, an eraser, a scale, a boundary map and a standard interpretation key. The image is provided in the study centre laboratory, or you download one as in Exercise 2, and it should be a False Colour Composite.

Its eight steps run from image acquisition and boundary clipping (a village, ward or grid) through the Exercise 15 interpretation key and a Level II classification scheme based on the National Remote Sensing Centre system to ground truthing, accuracy checking and the final map.

Many students build their analysis on secondary data alone. MGGL-005 works from downloaded imagery, yet Exercise 16 adds ground truthing: verify the doubtful features in the field with GPS help, or partly against a high-resolution true colour image such as Google Earth, then correct the map.

Learners from Hindi-medium schooling often find technical writing in English hard going, and English-medium learners who switch to Hindi can lack the terms. The prospectus gives English as the MSCGG medium of instruction, and the MGGL-005 course book states no separate language rule for the record.

Where MGGL-005 outputs go wrong: formulas, matrices and borrowed data

Most IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical mistakes we would watch for sit in a few exercises where the book asks for numbers as well as a picture:

• Exercise 7 converts digital numbers to top-of-atmosphere radiance and then surface reflectance in the Raster Calculator, with constants taken from the Landsat-8 MTL.txt metadata file and an ESUN value for band 4.
• Exercise 12 depends on the right bands: for Landsat 9 the book uses band 5 as NIR, band 4 as red, band 3 as green and band 6 as SWIR.
• Exercise 22 asks for overall accuracy (correctly classified pixels on the diagonal divided by total pixels, times 100), producer’s accuracy (omission error) and user’s accuracy (commission error).
• Exercise 28 says the sampling station longitude and latitude must be in metres, not decimal degrees, while Exercise 26 only asks for latitude and longitude values in the Excel file.
• Exercise 29 reminds you that the layer weights in the overlay must add up to 100.
• Exercise 11 warns that the SCP preprocessing tool may be missing in some QGIS versions, and the book falls back on the Raster Calculator.

In experiment-based practicals we see wrong scoring, wrong reference values and conclusions that the data do not support. The MGGL-005 book calls its tasks experiments, and the Exercise 7 reflectance steps and the Exercise 22 accuracy figures are where that shows.

Computer practical records often carry code with no output, or an output that does not match the code. In MGGL-005 the code is the Raster Calculator expression of Exercises 7, 11 and 12, and the June 2025 papers ask for output maps wherever applicable, so keep each expression next to the map it produced.

Some students write an analysis on figures they assumed instead of data they gathered. Exercises 26 and 28 begin by asking you to obtain air or water quality values for sampling stations in your area of interest, so the readings in your MGGL-005 record and their source have to be real.

Three MGGL 005 searches, answered from the documents

Logins, plugins and one retired link for the IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical

Before the IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical fortnight starts, set up the accounts and plugins the book relies on. Exercise 2 says Bhoonidhi (ISRO’s data portal, run by the National Remote Sensing Centre) and USGS EarthExplorer both need you to register and log in before you download, and Exercise 13 repeats the login step for DEM data. EarthExplorer’s own page says you must be logged in to download scenes.

Exercises 6, 24 and 25 send Sentinel-2 users to dataspace.copernicus.eu, the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem. Exercise 12 still names the Copernicus Open Access Hub at scihub.copernicus.eu, which stopped operating on 2 November 2023 according to its own closing notice, so use the Data Space address there too.

The book asks for the latest version of QGIS and names these plugins: Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin or SCP (Exercise 1 asks you to install it, and Exercises 5, 6, 17, 19, 20 and 24 use it), Profile Tool (Exercise 5), Georeferencer (Exercise 8), QuickMapServices (Exercise 3), QuickOSM (Exercise 23), and SAGA or GRASS (Exercises 14 and 29).

In our experience three causes stand out across programmes: information arrives late and differs between centres, practicals assume time and presence distance learners rarely have, and the record gets treated as formatting instead of proof of learning. For MGGL-005, sorting the logins and plugins above before Day 1 tackles the first.

MSCGG semester-four titles to keep beside MGGL-005

Ask on WhatsApp which semester-four titles fit

The MGGL 005 Remote Sensing Techniques lab fortnight, day by day

The IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical plan below is built from the course book’s day table, its Make It Yourself tasks and the data or kit each exercise names. Your centre’s batches decide the dates.

The six application exercises are 24 snow and glacier mapping (Sentinel-2 Level-2A, under 20 percent cloud), 25 landslides (SRTM DEM with Sentinel-2 and LISS data), 26 atmospheric pollution (air quality values from sampling stations), 27 coastal regulation zones (coastline and the CRZ Notification 2019 zones), 28 water pollution (water quality values from sampling stations) and 29 groundwater potential zones. The day table fits one of them into Day 12 and one into Day 13, while the introduction asks you to complete all the practical exercises, so confirm with your counsellor how many applications your record must carry.

The learners who do well begin early, check the rules at their own study centre, keep a dated record of each lab day, collect signatures as they go, and know each page well enough to explain it. For MGGL-005 that means a dated entry for each of the 13 working days before Day 14.

We see counsellor certificates left unsigned. The MGGL-005 book lists no certificate, so if your counsellor adds one, have it signed before the record session on Day 13 closes.

We also see title pages with a wrong enrolment number, programme or study centre. The MGGL-005 book prints no cover fields, so write the course as MGGL-005 Remote Sensing Techniques and the programme as M.Sc. (Geography) (MSCGG), the way the papers print them.

Four MGGL 005 question paper sets against the exercise numbers

We read four IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical term-end papers: June 2025 Set-I and Set-II, December 2025 Set-I and June 2026 Set-I. The June 2025 sets also ask for output maps wherever applicable and neat procedural steps. The table maps each question to the exercise that teaches it.

No question in these four papers matched Exercises 1, 21, 22 or 23, and none used the absolute atmospheric correction of Exercise 7; Exercises 18 and 20 repeat the methods of 17 and 19 on a second image. June 2026 changed the pattern in three ways: it dropped the any-one-of-six application question and asked only for groundwater, its Q7 asks for any two of four short tasks, and its Q3 asks for radiometric correction using histogram equalization, which joins Exercise 6 with a method the book explains in the Exercise 11 introduction, so revise both.

The practical examination fee for a course of up to 4 credits is Rs 300, paid with the Term-End Examination form and not refundable.

Many learners mix up the 300 and 500 rupee amounts. MGGL-005 carries 4 credits, so the Rs 300 practical examination slab applies to it, while the 8-credit MGGP-001 project of the same semester falls in the Rs 500 project evaluation slab.

The IGNOU MGGL 005 Practical shares its semester with the MGGP-001 project, which is registered in semester four after the synopsis and topic were settled in semester three. If you want help with that project, see our customised project service; the MGGL-005 record itself stays your own lab work.

Talk to us about the MGGP-001 project

Official IGNOU documents read for this MGGL-005 page

shrichakradhar.com is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by IGNOU. Our study guides, guess papers and solved assignments are study reference material; the MGGL-005 practical record has to come from your own lab sessions.