HOPING FOR A SEAT: Parents and students stand in a long queue to collect application forms for I PUC admissions at Sheshadripuram College in Bangalore on Tuesday. — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

BANGALORE: For thousands of Class X students throughout the city, it was their first big move towards a college education. On Tuesday, with their parents in tandem, the boys and girls queued up before pre-university colleges here to collect application forms. Their X Standard and SSLC examination results were weeks away.

At most colleges in the city, the crowds had gathered on Tuesday morning. With the Pre-University Education Department ruling that the admission forms should be sold much before the results, the applicants had more time in hand. That explained why by afternoon, the crowds had thinned at Mount Carmel College and St. Joseph's PU College.

The revised PU Department rules stipulated that the admission forms should be priced at Rs. 15, and the purchase of the college prospectus should not be a compulsion.

But most students had picked up a copy of the prospectus and information booklets that were priced between Rs. 50 and 75. The form sales were brisk.

At the Mount Carmel College, for instance, 1,900 forms were sold by Tuesday afternoon. Most applications were for the Science stream, the Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Biology (PCMB) combination being the most popular.

Yet there were students such as Asha Vinekar, who had applied for PCBH because Mount Carmel was the only college that she knew which offered Home Science as one of the subjects.

The students applied different parameters to select a PU college. Convenient distance from home was one. Reputation and even parental insistence were big factors. A parent, Hariharan, had bought applications from Christ Junior College and Jothi Nivas College for his daughter and yet preferred Mount Carmel for its "reputation." While the students and parents stood in queues and spoke out their preferences, some college officials were feeling "harassed." One college principal wanted the parents to stop bombarding them with "irrelevant questions" and simply get details from the newspapers.

She had a similar response when this newspaper wanted the cut-off marks.

Prospectus sold

Some students and parents complained to the PU department that a reputed city college was insisting that the students buy the college prospectus along with the application form. This was against the new rules of the department.

PU Commissioner S.G. Hegde said the college had admitted the mistake and blamed it on "miscommunication."

The college management had asked the staff in-charge of selling the forms to discontinue the practice from Wednesday, Mr. Hegde added

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