The Class XII board results have suddenly become very important –— they already determine admission to the IITs, NITs and now, perhaps, will also determine admission into deemed universities. In a meeting with representatives from deemed universities (DUs) in New Delhi on Monday, Minister for Human Resource Development, Kapil Sibal, proposed that deemed universities take higher secondary marks, in addition to the AIEEE scores as a criterion to admit students.
Nearly 130 officials from such universities including VIT University, SRM University and Sastra, participated in the meeting.
A deemed university council, which would comprise seven representatives from the universities, four subject experts and two members from the ministry will be constituted soon to look into the issues of the deemed universities, the Minister said.
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The deemed universities have been urged to adopt a formula with a minimum weightage of 40 per cent for board exam marks and asked to use AIEEE as the entrance test instead of their exam.
However, since the entire proposal is optional, deemed university officials are relived as they can still conduct their own entrance exams.
The stress is on using board exams marks as an additional parameter for admissions as it will improve the school education system, officials said.
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S. Vaidhyasubramaniam, Dean, Planning & Development, Sastra University, said, “I think it is a good first step in the right direction as it provides an optimal balance between board exam marks and CET scores. It has also addressed the fear of rural students as the new formula allows DUs and States to also give 100 weightage to normalised Class XII marks. The flexibility given to DUs must be judiciously leveraged keeping the students’ and nation’s interest in mind.”
On Saturday, IIT directors discussed a compromise formula which included a proposal to take the top 20-30 students based on percentile ranking of respective boards to prepare the merit list.