The Hindu : Kerala News : Online counselling for Cusat B.Tech. course

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 02, 2006

Kerala

Kerala

Online counselling for Cusat B.Tech. course

G. Krishnakumar

Preliminary work for shifting the admission process to online mode has begun

KOCHI: Encouraged by the success of the Government's online centralised allotment of professional college seats, the Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) has decided to go in for online counselling for its B.Tech. programmes from next year.

This will bring joy to hundreds of students opting for various engineering programmes offered by Cusat. The International Relations and Academic Admissions (IRAA) wing of the university has started preliminary work on shifting the admission process to the online mode. Cusat now conducts counselling on its Kalamassery campus itself with a pre-specified time schedule.

Confirming the decision, Vice-Chancellor P.K. Abdul Azis said that the university would approach the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to fully automate the counselling process.

The NIC had designed the software for the online centralised allotment conducted by the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations for admission to various professional courses in the State.

Dr. Azis said that the success of the online counselling conducted by the Entrance Commissioner had prompted the university authorities to introduce a similar pattern in Cusat from next year.

The IRAA would prepare a project report highlighting the advantages of online counselling. A detailed discussion would be held among various university authorities before finalising the project.

Under the online system, all a candidate has to do is to log on to a designated website by giving the roll number, the application number and the key number that is given in the candidate's admit card.

The advantage here is that the application number and the key number are normally known only to the candidate and, therefore, the likelihood of any unauthorised entry into the site is very slim.

Moreover, after the first entry, once a candidate sets the password for the site, unauthorised entry is rendered more or less impossible.

Once the candidate is on to the home page, he/she sees on screen the full list of courses for which he/she is eligible to submit options.

The priority list can be revised any number of times during the period of counselling set by the university authorities.

Candidates can also take printouts of the `worksheet' on which they have marked the preferences. After the window for marking preferences is over, the web page will be blocked and `frozen' so that candidates can take a final look at their option list without making any further changes.

Automated allotment

Once all the candidates' options are in, the NIC will trigger the command for the computer to begin the automated allotment. A stand-alone computer that is hacker-proof will do this allotment.

The software's algorithm co-relates the candidate's rank and preference with the courses available and assigns it to the candidate.

The details of the allotment will then be posted on the same website that the students logged on at first.

After the first round of allotment, the candidates will have the option of cancelling their higher-order option or revising that option list.

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