THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The National Informatics Centre (NIC) has readied, for likely use this year, a software that allows for automated allotment of seats for engineering and medical courses in the State. Minister for Education M.A. Baby and Secretary, Higher Education, P.J. Thomas have reportedly thrown their weight behind this `online counselling programme' that, according to a source at NIC, has been designed for a speedier, cost-effective and student-friendly Centralised Allotment Process (CAP).

The main advantage of the new system is that a student can log on to the NIC allotment site from any location by entering his/her roll number, application number and the key number as given in the admit card. On screen will be the full list of courses and colleges that are available to the student; the number of options available will depend on whether the student wrote only the engineering entrance, the medical entrance or both. The student can then indicate the priority order of courses and colleges. After the first login, the student can also set a password for the page to prevent unauthorised entry into the site.

"We will provide the students with a window of seven to 10 days for marking their options. They can log on from their home or from an Internet café. So there is no hurry or tension as experienced at a CAP venue. A student with both engineering and medical course eligibility may have more than 500 course-college combinations to rank. His choice is not limited to the seats that are available at his allotted time at the CAP venue as was the case in previous years," the NIC source explained to The Hindu on Wednesday. "The student can save his priority order and even update it during this time period. After the designated time is over, the site will be frozen for three days so that no more entries are made. Then the automated allotment begins."

The seat allotment is done by another computer that is totally isolated from the one that takes in the students' options. The software has been so designed that the allotment can be completed in about 48 hours. The NIC has already completed a mock allotment using the data from last year's CAP. The course-college allotment received by each student is posted on the same web site and students would be asked to remit the required fee at select branches of Canara Bank. The banks would be given a login facility to report the details of the same to the NIC.

The second round of allotment would be done after deleting the names of those students who fail to pay the fee. After this round, students would have to pay the difference in fee if there is any course change and those who get fresh admissions would be required to pay the full fee. After this, the students are issued the memo to join the colleges. This too would be sent over the Net. The colleges can access the full details of a candidate, including the photograph from the NIC site.

The final re-allotment would be done after the colleges report the number of students who failed to turn up for admissions. During the successive rounds of allotment, the students can keep updating their higher order options, online. In order to assist students who may not have easy access to the Net — especially those from rural areas — the NIC has proposed to the Government the setting up of special CAP centres in all 14 districts — preferably at Government engineering colleges.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail