There is currently no proposal to conduct entrance examinations to all undergraduate courses of the university in 2019, said M.K. Pandit, chairperson of the Admission Committee of Delhi University on Thursday.
“Currently, there is no such proposal for the 2019 admission season. Yes, in the long run, we will have to move to conducting entrance examinations and the university will have to work out how to conduct an examination on such a large-scale,” said Mr. Pandit. The university receives over 2.7 lakh applications for its undergraduate courses every year for approximately 56,000 seats.
According to reports in the media, Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Tyagi had said that the university’s Academic Council — a committee of education experts, college principals and faculty — was considering introducing the entrance examination to all undergraduate courses in the 2019-20 season. The V-C did not respond to The Hindu’s attempts to independently verify his statement.
Class 12 marks
Currently, DU conducts online examination for entrance for only a handful of courses while a majority of courses are based on marks received in Class 12 board examinations.
Entrance-based courses take a mix of marks obtained in Class 12 and performance in the computer-based entrance examination. Online entrance examination to PG examination were started in 2017 after much resistance from students who said that the online examination would deprive several students from rural areas the opportunity to study at DU as they may not be comfortable with the online format.
Jawaharlal Nehru University has also planned to take its entrance examination online in May 2019 and the Vice-Chancellor had announced that the National Testing Agency (NTA) will be conducting it.
The students had opposed the move saying that a MCQ style question paper would not been a proper indicator of the calibre of a student seeking admission on social science courses of for M.Phil/PhD courses.
The proposal to conduct an entrance examination has been called for by several faculty members as the cut-off for many of DU’s undergraduate programmes have skyrocketed over the past few years and conducting an entrance examination would reduce the dependence on a single score alone.
