Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Entrance exams and college admissions in Tamilnadu

Board exams are underway in Tamilnadu. After that there will be chaos in the life of every student who is about to enter college until his first day in college. I am against having so many entrance exams. I particularly oppose the exams being conducted by the private engineering colleges. There is also a case in progress in front of a division bench at the supreme court which is expected to announce guidelines concerning the admission process in India. Infact the recent mess was created only because of some arbitrary judgements made by the supreme court in cases relating to minority educational institutions. Ideally I would like the following scenario in every state in India particularly TN. There should be one exam, one application and one admission process for any course/college in TN. Ideally this would be similar to those conducted by the Anna University now. Besides exams like AIEEE and the corresponding exam for Medicine should be enuogh to secure admission in any part of India, including the Deemed universities in TN. So by writing TNPCEE one should get admission to all professional colleges coming under affiliating universities in TN. By writing AIEEE one should get admission to all universities (limited seats) in India including the NITs and Deemed Universities. Ofcourse JEE is there for IITs. A similar scenario should be there for all other courses including Medicine, Arts, Law etc. Except for few institutions like IITs, IIMs no institution should be allowed to conduct entrance exams on their own. Admission again should be a single window process. Management seats in Deemed Universities/private/Minority institutes can be filled by those institutions but they must admit based on the marks secured on the above mentioned entrance exams only. I would also suggest doing away with reservation quotas except for SC/ST. Infact the private colleges/deemed universities may insist on this to adopt to one exam/application/admission scenario. Even the exams at the graduate level have to be streamlined. For instance why should Anna Univ, Bharthidasan univ etc conduct entrance exams for MBA on their own. We can very well have a common exam for the whole of TN. Rest of the seats can be filled by CAT scores. In engineering a start has been made with a common graduate level exam being introduced last year. Hope that succeeds. Infact things are moving towards the situation envisaged in my blog here. Hope the upcoming SC judgement clears things and facilitates the arrival of such a scenario.

2 comments:

BD said...

I agree with you. In my home state, Orissa, engineering aspirants just need to give two entrance examinations. One for IITs and another for regional colleges in Orissa. It has not only helped better coordination and streamlining of the process but has also helped students cope up with the pressure of giving so many examinations.

Anonymous said...

That was prescient of you to include this post before the ruckus created by jayalalitha!