Admission mess
Getting admitted to college, especially a good college, is generally speaking, a stressful experience at the best of times. But this year, in Mumbai, for parents and students alike, the whole process has been fraught with needless tension. Put bluntly, the admission scenario right now is a right royal mess, thanks to the circumstances, and with a little bit of help from the state education department.
The first thing that went wrong was a hare-brained formula for ‘normalisation’ of the marks obtained by students passing their class X from different boards such as SSC, CBSE and ICSE. It is now generally agreed that the formula gives an unfair boost to the SSC students, as a result of which the cut-offs for many colleges got pushed high into stratospheric levels. The education department may have started out with the best of intentions, but this was an ill-planned move and the fact that it was rammed down the colleges’ throat during admission time was an example of poor thinking.
While students were trying to cope with this shock, along came another blow from the government which mandated that colleges should reserve 70 per cent seats for students from their own educational district. Such quotas would mean a raw deal for meritorious students from the suburbs who could miss out on a prestigious south Mumbai college simply because of where they happen to live. There is a fair amount of geographical cross-pollination in the city as students chase the best colleges for their respective courses and this has largely been beneficial. To stymie that again in the middle of the admission process was, perverse.
More : dnaindia.com