Admission to some of the preferred programmes in colleges will be tougher this year. In some engineering programmes and B.Com streams, the cut-off could rise by as much as 20 marks, say college principals.
On Monday, following the announcement of Class XII results, School Education Minister Anbil Mahesh Poyyamozhi said around 30,600 students from the science group had scored between the 551-600 marks range this year, a huge increase compared to the previous year when 1,867 students were placed in that range. In Commerce, 8,909 students had scored between the same marks range as compared to 4,437 students last year.
Though the computation, up to two decimal points, has brought relief to colleges, making it easy to develop the merit list for students, the competition has become that much tougher. But some school heads say students may hesitate to pursue engineering.
Bridge courses
“Students mostly had only online schooling for a good part of Class XII. It will impact college admission. Higher secondary classes are an important stepping stone to college education,” said N. Vijayan, chairman, Zion Group of Schools.
Colleges should consider implementing a bridge course to strengthen the students’ knowledge in the basics, he suggested.
Santhosh Baboo, principal of D.G. Vaishnav College, anticipated a 10%-15% hike in the cut-off for all programmes. “There will be a good rush for Commerce, BCA and B.Sc Computer Science programmes. We offer programmes such as B.Com Honours and B.Com Finance and Taxation. We will get a good number of applications for these programmes,” he said.
The rush for science programmes is not as high as that for commerce streams as students would consider professional programmes, he added.
Lalitha Balakrishnan, principal of MOP Vaishnav College, said the stacking up of more students in the 550-600 mark range as compared to last year would make competition tougher. “Commerce is more of interest to us. Usually the cut-off is high. We should wait for CBSE students also to file applications. By early August we will have a better idea,” she said.
More top scorers
This year, in science stream there is a 16-fold increase in the number of students with higher scores, pushing up the cut-off for the engineering programmes such as Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, said independent education consultant Jayaprakash Gandhi.
(With input from S. Poorvaja)
