Mission admission: check your documents carefully

Paperwork and administrative procedures can derail a student’s Delhi University dream

Admission to Delhi University is not a cakewalk even if you have the right score to get into the college of your choice. Students from other States face the maximum problem, partly due to discrepancies in documents and partly because of lack of uniformity in admission process of different colleges. The Hindu spoke to a number of DU students to find out the problems they faced at the time of their admission last year.

Documents withdrawal

“The most difficult part in the whole process of switching from one college to another was lack of cooperation from the college staff,” said Charvi Tandon, a psychology student. Recounting their struggle during admissions to DU last year, many students complained that fee transfer from one college to another and withdrawal of documents proved to be a strenuous task. Delay in administrative operations resulted in unnecessary chaos among students, as they were left with little time to get admission in another college.

Original mark sheet

A major issue that several students from Northeastern States faced was unavailability of the original mark sheet, which delayed their admission considerably.

“While some colleges had no issue with it [unavailability of original mark sheet], others simply refused to accept our admission forms. We tried to approach the Vice-Chancellor’s office but were told that the admission process depends entirely on the college. The college staff, however, insisted they were following UGC guidelines,” said Suzanne, a student pursuing political science.

OBC certificate issue

Some students from Kerala faced an issue with their Other Backward Classes (non-creamy layer) certificate. The certificate issued to students by the State authorities mentioned the class as ‘Islam-Mappila’, while the centralised list on OBC (non-creamy layer) only listed ‘Mappila’ as the class. Again, the problem was not with all colleges. However, many students were forced to take admission in colleges which were not their first choice.

Maaroof, the president of Maithreyi, a Malayali students’ fraternity in DU, told The Hindu that the error in certificates has been corrected this year.

This problem again was faced by students from Kerala who had taken the State board examination. Admission forms of several students were rejected because some colleges stated that mathematics taught in commerce stream was different than that in science. This happened because certificates issued by the Kerala State Board mentioned ‘mathematics-com’ as the subject name.