Selecting seats online

Updated on: Wednesday, April 18, 2012

with the introduction of online counselling for the Common Entrance Test (CET) by the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA), candidates can pick a professional seat in the comfort of their home.

CET follows in the steps of the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE), for admissions into National Institutes of Technology (NIT) among other colleges, and the Joint Entrance Test for admissions into the Indian Institutes of Technology, both of which have implemented online counselling.

One of the advantages of selecting seats from home is that the candidate need not travel all the way to Bangalore, or the few counselling centres, and wait for hours in a queue for a few minutes with a counsellor.

The move seemed to have piqued the interest of students. “Online counselling will be convenient, as it will save time. Moreover, we will get updates frequently about seat availability and the waiting list, and so the permutation and combination of it can be worked out at home itself,” said Amala Poli, a PUC II student of Mount Carmel College.
Clearing doubts

Before the online counselling takes place, the student has to go to one of the 12 KEA helpline centres set up across the State between June 6 and June 20. Here the documents will be verified, originals returned and attested copies will be kept.

After this, an acknowledgement card and a verification slip will be given. Being in the first year of implementation, the online methodology of the counselling process is bound to set aflutter butterflies in the student's stomach. Faced with the fact that there will be little contact with officials during the seat selection, Chitra Patil, a PUC II student of Oxford College, said: “In face-to-face counselling, we can get our doubts cleared with the panellists there. In online counselling there will be no one to help.”

To this effect, the examinations authority will conduct an interactive audio-video session after the document verification process. Handbooks and online allotment tutorial CDs will also be distributed to address doubts during the process.

At any point of the counselling process, if a candidate forgets the login password, a new one will be allotted by the KEA after verifying the credentials of the applicant.
How the process works

At this juncture, the candidate will be given secure IDs and passwords, which allows him/her access to the counselling page of the KEA website.

Between July 10 and 19, the candidate has to enter options of the disciplines he/she is eligible for in the website.

They can enter their choices (with no limit to the number of choices) from the seats available — entering the codes given for preferred college, category (General, SC/ST, etc.), course (codes for medical, engineering, etc.) and discipline in the course required.

Those eligible for both medical and engineering, i.e., secured a rank after writing Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology, can opt for colleges in both fields.

The preference in the seats desired must be mentioned clearly; and if the candidate desires, can list out an unlimited number of options.

This way, based only on availability and merit, the student is given his or her most preferred seat within the rank obtained.

The KEA strongly recommends thorough research into the preferences of colleges and streams while entering the order of preferences. “Even a small mistake in entering the options may deprive a student of a seat,” warned the authority.
Mock allotment

To prevent mistakes, and to allow the candidate to change the selection, a mock session of seat allotment will be conducted on July 20.

As the data used in this will be the current rank list, the seats allotted to the students will be an accurate projection. At this juncture, till July 24, the student will be allowed to change the preference list. To ensure the list is final, SMSes will be sent confirming the change.

When the counselling starts on July 25, the seat allotment will start with medical, followed by ISMH (Indian Systems of Medicine and Homoeopathy), engineering and architecture.

And here comes the concept of seat tracking, which gives real-time updates of the seat matrix on the KEA website or through bulletins in the helpline centres.

One the seat is selected, the candidate is given seven days' time to accept the seat. If rejected, the seat will be pooled in for the next round of counselling.

There will be a total of three rounds of counselling, ending on August 13, wherein the candidate can either take admission into the college, or surrender the seat hoping for a better seat in the next round of counselling.

Selecting seats online

More Education news