While the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) on Tuesday announced the top-five ranks in different streams, none of the toppers (barring those in engineering) wants to pursue courses in the streams they have topped.
All top-five rank students in Indian Systems of Medicine and Homoeopathy, BSc. Agriculture, BSc. Veterinary Science, and B. Pharma and Pharma-D. want to pursue courses in other streams.
Based on weightage
KEA authorities said these students were allotted ranks based on the weightage given in CET and pre-university courses, which differs from course to course.
“We have not taken into account what course they want to pursue. Ranks are allotted based on the papers they write,” a source in the KEA said.
While 39,348 candidates appeared for physics, chemistry and mathematics papers, 1,549 candidates wrote only physics, chemistry and biology papers. Majority of them — 1.39 lakh of the total 1.8 lakh candidates who wrote the test — appeared for all the four papers.
‘A preparation ground’
Soumya Shashidhar Kattimani of Alva’s PU College, Mangaluru, who bagged the fifth rank in the agriculture course, said she used CET as a preparation ground for NEET.
“As NEET was four days after the CET, I decided to write CET for preparation. I used the four days’ time to tweak my preparation strategy based on the performance,” she said, and added that she has no plans of pursuing farm science course.
