Karnataka varsities allowed to conduct tests to fill MBA seats

Govt. forced to decentralise admission process as 10,000 seats yet to be filled

September 25, 2013 08:51 am | Updated June 02, 2016 02:56 pm IST - BANGALORE:

The large number of vacant government and government-quota MBA seats has forced the State government to decentralise the admission process for the first time since the implementation of the Postgraduate Common Entrance Test (PGCET). It has now allowed individual universities to conduct their own entrance tests to fill over 10,000 seats.

The all-India entrance test to fill government and government-quota MBA seats — the Common Management Admission Test (CMAT) — which was made mandatory from this year, is being blamed for the confusion.

As a management professor pointed out, “In the three tests of CMAT, only 12,000 from Karnataka registered, of which only 3,816 were found eligible.”

The confusion has also resulted in another piquant situation: students have ended up opting for the more expensive private quota seats rather than the much cheaper government quota seats within the same university or college. The government and managements share the MBA seats in private colleges in a 50:50 ratio. The fee for MBA seats through the government quota is Rs. 24,390, while those allotted management seats will have to cough up Rs. 54,390.

Going by the statistics of demand and supply of MBA seats, the inescapable fact is that there are far fewer takers compared to the number of seats available. The Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) announced last week that 10,119 MBA government seats, of the available 13,594, were not taken even after the second round of counselling.

KEA Executive Director Rame Gowda expressed helplessness. “Even after so many rounds of counselling, the seats have remained vacant,” he said.

M.K. Sridhar, former executive director of the Karnataka Knowledge Commission and reader in Canara Bank School of Management Studies, said only 129 appeared for the Bangalore University entrance test conducted on September 22 though 3,000 seats were available in 68 colleges.

Representatives of around 13 universities that have affiliated colleges running the MBA programme met in August and sought permission from the government to allow them to fill these seats on their own. Some universities said having a centralised PGCET would be time consuming. The State government agreed. Now, the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) has announced its entrance test on September 30.

Due to this confusion, different universities are also going to end up having different academic calendars.

Different sets of students will have to join the same course on separate days depending on which entrance test they cleared. For instance, the KEA said September 23 was the last day to report to college. BU reopened on September 23, but students allotted seats through the university’s entrance test will join college on October 7.

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