After declaring all the students in Intermediate second-year pass without examinations, the government is contemplating to make all of them eligible for engineering admissions irrespective of their performance in the EAMCET to be conducted in August.
Since the EAMCET or some kind of entrance test is mandatory to decide the merit for admissions into professional courses, officials are also looking into the option of reducing the qualifying marks to lessen the burden on the students.
Officials are considering these ideas given the disturbed academic year with literally no physical classes held during the entire year though online classes were held. The decision would not affect the chances of any students in the order of merit or other wise as the admissions into engineering and other professional courses are based on merit in the entrance test both open and reserved categories.
The idea is being discussed and will be put before the Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao and Education Minister P. Sabitha Indra Reddy for consideration, a senior official revealed.
Every year thousands of students fail to clear the EAMCET despite getting passed in the Intermediate or vice versa and lose an opportunity to join engineering courses despite the availability of seats.
“Since the entire year was disrupted, lots of rural and poor students had little reach to online classes and their inability to adapt from new learning methods as they were exposed to digital learning for the first time. So their inability to clear the EAMCET in the present circumstances should not stop them from studying further,” an official argued.
So what is the use of conducting EAMCET in that scenario? Officials remind that admissions into professional courses have to be based on an entrance test for deciding the merit. So conduct of EAMCET is must to meet the criterion and to avoid legal problems. However, the State governments have the liberty to decide the qualifying marks.
Moreover, the government, for this year, has also done away with the 25% weightage for Intermediate marks for arriving at the final rank of the candidates. As many as 4,80,555 students are admitted in the second year Intermediate and among these about 2.50 lakh candidates are in the mathematics and science stream.
As on Sunday, 2,28,792 candidates have registered for taking the EAMCET of which 1,51,742 registered for the engineering test and 77,050 for the agriculture and medical stream.
