The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Will the High Court intervene?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 15, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Will the High Court intervene?

V. Jayanth

Online registration for TNPCEE 2005. — File photo: K. Pichumani

CHENNAI: The Madras High Court has given the State Government and its education authorities a week, to respond to the petition filed by a CBSE student on the Common Entrance Test (CET).

With public examinations for Plus Two students of all streams slated to begin early in March, students are waiting anxiously for more information from the Government on its new CET policy. The CBSE students wonder if the Tamil Nadu Professional Courses Entrance Examinations (TNPCEE) will be confined to just their stream or whether the Court will widen its application to all streams. They want to know more about its format. Will it be based only on the State Board syllabus? What type of questions will there be? Multiple choice objective, descriptive or both? Above all, when will the examinations be conducted?

State Board students too are not free of worry. They are unsure whether they will have to take the TNPCEE. But there are more pressing concerns, foremost among them being ranking.

As it is common for a few, if not scores of students, to securing the same marks — say 199 out of 200 for the chosen subjects — how will they be ranked? Even 0.25 percentage points can make a huge difference down the line, more so in medical admissions. And there are very strong as well as political views on the ranking method to be adopted.

Above all, the State authorities have not yet decided on how to deal with the private self-financing colleges.

Some of the associations/consortia have written to the Government offering a certain percentage of seats to the common pool for admission through the Government's single window system (SWS). But they want "freedom" to admit students to the "management quota."

They say the Government has not responded till now, nor initiated any move for a dialogue to finalise the arrangements for the admission season.

The larger issue of admissions to self-financing colleges itself needs to be reviewed and decided upon. Though a CET is conducted, parents and students insist the SWS merit list prescribed by the Supreme Court is not there.

A transparent system of admission has to be put in place for them.

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