Nagpur : From last five years all private engineering colleges of Maharashtra state are struggling hard to fill admissions to first year degree courses. Though subsequent Chief Ministers tried to resolve the issue, they failed to find the solution. With a fear of facing the same situation this year, too, a delegation of engineering colleges on Tuesday met Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis requesting him to lower down eligibility criterion from 50% to 45% for the students of open category and from 45% to 40% for the reserved category students. The college managements while talking said, “The result of Class XII this year is not upto the mark. Naturally, number of students having good score is less.
Secondly, there is a change in the mindset of students as far as opting for engineering. Most of the students have shown inclination to pursue basic science. This is creating problems for the self-financed technical institutions to sustain.” In a letter to Chief Minister, colleges have appealed, “Present eligibility criteria should be lowered down. We want to attract your attention towards some states like Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab which have already relaxed their eligibility criteria as per the guidelines of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) that supports the demand of colleges. We feel it will help in garnering good admissions.” Colleges argued, “After the present result, it is observed that the students scoring brilliantly in JEE (Mains and Advanced) have failed miserably in scoring marks in PCM in state board examinations.
This implies that there could be lack of co-ordination or understanding examination pattern rather than students’ academic incompetency.Hence,it is requested to pay a kind consideration to relax admission criteria which would doubly benefit the students as well as the colleges, which would face less problem in getting admission.”
Percentile issue to be the headache
After facing problem in software, now process of admissions to degree engineering courses is likely to suffer from percentile issue. Maharashtra State Common Entrance Test (CET) Cell did valuation of MHT CET and allot percentile instead of marks. Unfortunately, it has not developed any system that could convert percentile into percentage. MHT CET was conducted on 12 days in 24 sessions. It was divided in three groups– Physics Chemistry Biology (PCB), Physics Chemistry Mathematics (PCM) and Physics Chemistry Mathematics and Biology (PCMB). All the three groups have several students eligible to get admission.
Every session and every group has a topper with all scoring same percentile. Suppose there are 24 students scoring same percentile then there is no system that could decide who is the single topper. Obviously it will pose problem when allotment of seats take place. If Government does not come up with the software that could convert the percentile into percentage then the admission process again face the mess.
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