Will the admissions haze ever lift?

Updated on: Monday, November 07, 2011

“What we notice is that this unusual procedure is adopted for the first time and the impression given in the court is that this method is not going to be continued for the next year…”

On October 18, a Division Bench of the Kerala High Court, comprising Acting Chief Justice C. N. Ramachandran Nair and Justice P.S. Gopinathan, dismissed the writ petitions filed against the normalisation procedure used this year by the Commissioner of Entrance Examinations for preparing the rank list for admission to B.Tech. courses in the State. The judges said they were dismissing the petitions without going into the merit of the contentions made in them.

The judgment mentions that it is the impression of the court that the method for normalisation will not be followed next year. So, can those preparing to write the entrance examinations in April 2012 come to the conclusion that the “normalisation” of marks of the qualification examinations conducted by various boards will be done away with for preparing the rank list? Not at all. But why?

This is that time of the year when the office of the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations starts the activities associated with the preparation of the prospectus for the engineering and medical entrance examinations. A “revamp committee” studies the current prospectus and makes recommendations for changes, if any, in that. This year, no such committee can function effectively yet because it is the State government which has to take a policy call on the methodology for preparing the engineering entrance rank list.

Panel not formed

In the second week of October, after a meeting involving the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations, a proposal was sent to the State government urging for the constitution of an expert committee to study the process of normalisation and give recommendations. Such a committee is yet to be constituted. This delay on the part of the government is perhaps symptomatic of the multidirectional pulls that it is experiencing on the normalisation front. There are those who want to revert to the old system of preparing the rank list based solely on the score in the entrance examination. There are those who want to retain normalisation but wish to alter the methodology for normalising marks. Then there are those who argue that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the 2011 system and that if the Kerala Plus Two students gain an intrinsic advantage in the process, then so be it.

Stakeholders such as G.P.C. Nayar, former president of the private self-financing engineering colleges' association in Kerala, have said that normalisation has driven more students away from Kerala than ever before. They have argued publicly that the confusion associated with the implementation of the new system has triggered widespread anxiety in the minds of parents and students.

On the other hand, educationists such as R.V.G. Menon, who chaired the entrance examination reforms committee, which suggested normalisation in the first place, are still firm in positing that the system of factoring in the marks scored in the Plus Two examinations is the just way of deciding who gets to study in a professional college. They hold that a question paper with multiple-choice question cannot test a candidate's ability to do an engineering course.

The parents of students from the streams of the Indian School Certificate and the Central Board of Secondary Education who turned to the judiciary with their grievances say that injustice should not be done to any category of students, no matter which system is in place. These parents want normalisation to be done away with.

What the government needs to do now is to come clean with a policy decision; a document perhaps which clearly lays down the government's logic for either doing away with normalisation or for continuing it with modifications. The office of the Commissioner has the data to help the government find out if those with high marks in the Plus Two examinations in the past have fared poorly in the entrance examinations. The percentage of such students each year will indicate to the government if a trend can be established in this matter. So far neither the government nor the office of the Commissioner has shown any inclination — at least in public — to conduct such a data analysis.

There is another point that the government and those preparing for future entrance examinations should keep in mind. The Centre has already announced the date for the national entrance examination for the MBBS programme. A committee headed by T. Ramaswami, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, is working to put in place a system for a pan-Indian engineering entrance examination. The Ramaswami committee has outlined six options for preparing the engineering rank list (The Hindu-EducationPlus, October 3). Factoring in the marks scored in the Plus Two examinations figures prominently in the options preferred by the committee.

Mr. Ramaswami has already made it clear to EducationPlus that he plans to do a trial-run normalisation using the marks data gathered from all 42 examination boards in the country. His pilot studies with data from four examination boards revealed normalisation to be stable over time and across boards.

Many feel that the least that the State government can do at this crucial juncture is to constitute immediately a team to liaise with the Union government and Mr. Ramaswami in particular to know the latest developments in New Delhi vis-à-vis the methodology for a pan-India engineering entrance examination.

“If Kerala can know in advance whether a pan-India engineering entrance test will be a reality or not in 2012, it can take a more meaningful call on the engineering entrance of that year. If Kerala need not conduct an engineering entrance in 2012, the government can sit back and relax. If not, Kerala needs to decide and decide fast how the entrance examination of 2012 is going to look like,” an official associated with the office of the Commissioner told EducationPlus.

Even if there is going to be a pan-India engineering entrance examination in 2012, it makes eminent sense for the State to be clear and ready with its own concept of an entrance examination. For, the new methodology for preparing an all-India rank list is as much susceptible to legal challenges as the Kerala system was. If the all-India system gets either stuck in court or is struck down by the court, Kerala may be forced to conduct its own examination.

Parents' worry

The CBSE/ICSE Parents' Forum, in a petition faxed to the Chief Minister on November 4, urged the government to take a final call on the 2012 entrance examination only after holding talks with all stakeholders. Any repetition of the “mistakes” of 2011 — including the factoring in of grace marks and marks of the practical examinations — would lead to the exclusion of many brilliant students from the rank list. Effective steps need to be taken to prevent such things from happening next year, the petition said.

With the Kerala High Court under the impression that the 2011 formula would not be repeated, with the Centre busy sculpting its own model for a country-wide entrance examination and with students preparing to write the engineering entrance examination of 2012 getting increasingly anxious about the rules of the game, the State government has its task cut out.

Will the admissions haze ever lift?

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