Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

Will Bill scrapping CET stand legal scrutiny?

K. Ramachandran

NewsAnalysis Supreme Court orders have reiterated the need for the test

CHENNAI: With the Assembly passing a Bill to scrap the time-tested common entrance test (CET) for professional courses admissions, the academic community will be watching two developments.

One is whether the Tamil Nadu Admission in Professional Educational Institutions Bill 2006 would stand legal scrutiny in the light of repeated Supreme Court orders reiterating the need for a CET for professional education admissions.

The second is how many rural students, "avowedly the targeted beneficiaries of the new Bill," will be able to enrol for professional courses.

Political parties have backed the demand for scrapping the CET, arguing that the rural students are unable to gain access to costly coaching centres for training for the entrance test. Ironically, the CET or the Tamil Nadu Professional Courses Entrance Examination (TNPCEE) was introduced in 1984 by the M.G. Ramachandran Government after it felt that the earlier admission system on the basis of Plus Two marks was subjective and did not help poor and meritorious students.

AICTE regulations

However, regulations of the AICTE and the Medical Council of India clearly state that if there is more than one Board of examining body conducting the qualifying examination (or where there is more than one medical college under administrative control of one authority), a competitive entrance examination must be held to achieve uniform evaluation.

An educationist from Tirunelveli, Jayendran, says every State in India admits students only on the basis of entrance examination.

Even those States, which earlier did not have CET, or institutions such as the BITS-Pilani, which used to follow normalisation procedure, have started admitting students through a CET in the past two years.

Anna University's former director of entrance tests and admissions, Prof. P.V. Navaneethakrishnan, says the normalisation procedure too needs to be more scientific.

Normalisation process

The Anandakrishnan committee report on shelving the CET seems to have recommended a normalisation/scaling process to bring the different streams of eligibility courses under one footing.

Some sections feel that the normalisation procedure (as laid out in the Bill), if followed, can benefit CBSE students. "Earlier only a handful of CBSE students entered Tamil Nadu's medical colleges. But now we may see more than 50 CBSE students getting into colleges in the State because they stand to get into the merit list with lesser raw marks, because the normalised marks will put them in top of the list," says Salem-based analyst Jayaprakash Gandhi.

He says an analysis of the previous years' results shows that students from urban districts have performed well in Board examinations, compared to those in rural areas.

Last year, 15 educational districts, all from rural areas, did not have even one student scoring 194/200 in the medical stream (biology/physics/chemistry).

Thirtyfive educational districts, mostly rural again, had less than three students scoring 194/200 in the same stream.

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