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| Thursday, Dec 07, 2006
Will Bill scrapping CET stand legal scrutiny?
News Analysis 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.
Courtesy: The Hindu
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