Now that the process of selling and getting back the application forms for the engineering/ medical entrance examinations 2011 is well and truly on track, officials in charge of the smooth conduct of these examinations are a relieved lot, albeit for now.
By the end of the first week of February more than one lakh applications were sold and close to 30,000 completed forms were received at the office of the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations (CEE). By then, the task of scrutinising the forms was also in full swing at that office.
While the CEE's office is busy answering anxious queries from parents and candidates —there were a flood of queries to begin with — public attention is also slowly beginning to shift to the level of preparedness of the government to carry out the ‘normalisation' of marks across different boards. This statistical exercise which would precede the preparation of the engineering rank-list is critically dependent on the availability of the data relating to ‘mean' and ‘standard deviation' of the marks/ grades of a batch of students.
What has the government done to ensure that such data would be available and that too on time? To begin with it has expanded the ‘normalisation committee' by inducting among others the director of the State Council Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and the directors of the higher secondary and vocational higher secondary departments.
According to government sources who have participated in the meetings of this committee and in meetings chaired by the Education Minister on this issue, the game plan is to task the SCERT to convene a meeting of representatives of boards prior to the conduct of the entrance examinations.
“Once we know the boards from where students have applied for the engineering entrance, we would invite them over for meetings and impress upon them the need to give us all the marks-related data we need. We would also stress the need for them to do all this before May 31, which is the cut-off date for submitting marks to the CEE,” a senior official present at various meetings of the committee, told The Hindu-EducationPlus . If need be, a government representative can also travel to various States to collect such data, the official pointed out.
The cut-off date is crucial to the preparation of the engineering rank-list. Once all the marks-related data is in, the CEE would then normalise these scores using the software developed by the National Informatics Centre (the same software used till now for carrying out allotments, but modified suitably for the engineering stream). This naturally would require more time. So, if the marks scored by candidates in the qualifying examinations keep shifting, this process would be thrown out of gear.
The cut-off date also implies — though the prospectus does not say so in as many words — that for all practical purposes the marks/ grades scored in any improvement examinations of any board of in the Save A Year (SAY) examinations of the State would not matter in the normalisation procedure and in the subsequent preparation of the engineering rank-list. Members of the normalisation committee have also, repeatedly, told the government that the cut-off date should be sacrosanct if there is to be any meaningful ‘normalisation' for the engineering stream.
Since the marks scored in the qualifying examination would play a pivotal role in this year's engineering entrance examination, the office of the CEE has decided that it would allow one more chance for candidates to submit these marks and/ or to correct the marks they have submitted now. “There was some confusion and anxiety among parents and candidates over how candidates who are appearing for this year's qualifying examinations would submit their marks in the application form.
Whatever, the candidates have submitted now is alright. At the appropriate time all candidates would be given an opportunity to submit/ correct their marks online. So they need not worry at all now,” an official associated with the entrance examinations told The Hindu-EducationPlus .
Moreover, once all the data relating to marks is finally in, the CEE may also publish these scores online so that candidates can verify whether the marks entered against their name is correct. “This step is very important,” the convener of the normalisation committee Rajoo Krishnan explained. “The correctness of the normalisation depends on the correctness of the data relating to the marks. If the mark of a candidate captured by the system is not the same as what he scored in the examination, it will have a bearing on that candidate's position in the rank-list. So, as a final safeguard, these marks need to be published prior to the normalisation.”
From the time all the required data is received by the CEE to the preparation of the engineering rank-list, it would take close to three weeks. This is assuming that there would not be disruptions/ interventions of any kind in this process. Needless to say, all this would not affect the preparation of the medical rank-list this year. That list would be prepared solely on the basis of a candidate's performance in the entrance examination.
Among the many anxious queries received by the office of the CEE, one relates to the tagging of the income certificate with the application form. Though the prospectus does lay down the rules for this, sources in the government say it would be a nice idea for candidates belonging to low-income families to submit an income certificate along with their application form. “There is a tuition fee waiver scheme of the AICTE. Other fee concessions may also apply,” an official pointed out.
Seat-fee talks
So what about the seat-fee talks between the government and the managements of private self-financing colleges which have become an ‘integral part' of the entrance process?
Would the managements want to seal a deal before the elections or even before the model code of conduct comes into play? Or would they prefer to wait and deal with the next government? What if a deal is sewn up now and that is deemed unacceptable by the next government?
So far neither the government nor the managements have aired their stand on this. The president of the Federation of Associations of Private Unaided Professional Colleges in India G. P. C. Nayar told The Hindu-EducationPlus that the Education Minister M. A. Baby has broached the idea of seat-fee talks for 2011. “I told him that the managements are ready for such talks,” Mr. Nayar said. Though Mr. Nayar says he sees no harm in seat-fee talks even when the model code of conduct for elections is in force, he also does not discount the possibility that the managements may also have to talk fees with the next government.
The last word on the engineering / medical entrance examinations 2011 is far from being said.
