A melting pot called entrance exam

Updated on: Tuesday, December 22, 2009

There is never a dull moment associated with the engineering / medical entrance examinations in Kerala. The pot, as they say, is always on the boil. This time too the first spark for ‘controversies' relating to these examinations was struck by none other than the Education Minister M. A. Baby, who recently announced that the negative mark for wrong answers in the entrance examinations has been reduced to half a mark. Till the 2009 examinations, this was one mark.

This, the Minister explained, was being done to allow more students to find a place in the rank list. The half-mark deduction would be symbolic, one designed to discourage students from large-scale guesswork.

The announcement set off a flurry of verbal exchanges—albeit through a section of the media—between those who opposed such a reduction in the negative mark and those who argued for scrapping the very system of disqualifying candidates from the entrance rank list.

The arguments flew thick and fast: “the reduction is designed to ensure that more seats in the self-financing colleges are filled”, “even those who guesstimate the answers can get a place in the rank list”, “this is the beginning of the end for quality…”

This was met with another flurry of arguments, mainly articulated by G. P.C. Nayar, the president of the association of private self-financing engineering colleges. His argument was that the government should end the practice of disqualifying students from the engineering/ medical rank list.

All those who write the examinations should be given a rank, however low. He also argued that most of the students who are disqualified are those who get very good marks in the qualifying examinations.

The irony of the whole issue was that something that was a non-issue so far suddenly became a hotly debated issue in the State. In other words, nobody seems to have put pressure on the government to reduce the negative mark to half a mark. But when the reduction was announced, there was immense pressure on the government to withdraw the announcement; eventually the one-mark negative mark was reinstated.

Sources in the Entrance Commissionerate confirmed to The Hindu-EducationPlus that more students would indeed have found a place in the rank lists had the negative mark been reduced to half mark. “For medicine the lowest rank would have been about 60,000 and for engineering this would have been 50,000, had there been a reduction in the negative marks. There would have been a lot of movement in the top order ranks,” one official said.

As the CEE does not ask for the marks scored in the qualifying examination during the time of submitting applications for the entrance examination, it cannot be known with certainty whether there are disqualified candidates who scored high marks in the qualifying examinations, the official added.

All this brouhaha surrounding the negative mark also took much-needed focus away from two other important things. The talks between the government and the managements on the issue of fee and the question of implementing reforms in the entrance examinations.

In the initial round of talks between Mr. Baby and a team led by Mr. Nayar, it was agreed that all allotments to engineering colleges would be completed by June 2010 so that classes can begin in July.

On the crucial question of fee the two sides agreed to disagree. While the government wanted self-financing colleges to reduce the fee in the government seats, the managements wanted to hike the fee to at least Rs. 38,700, the amount suggested years ago by the K. T. Thomas Committee.

Now the managements appear to have hardened their stand. Mr. Nayar told The Hindu-EducationPlus that in the next round of talks, the managements would demand that the fee for government seats be made at least Rs.40,000. “We have decided that there would no scaling down from here,” he asserted.

Last year the managements were adamant on limiting the number of allotments to self-financing colleges to two—the initial allotment and then a re-allotment.

This time, the managements have agreed to participate in all five rounds of allotment that the CEE plans to carry out. No allotment would, however, be allowed after June 30, 2010.However, if there are seats remaining vacant even after five rounds of allotment, the managements would have the right to fill them up.

Last year a clause in the seat-fee agreement that gave managements the right to admit candidates who do not even figure in the entrance rank list to those seats remaining vacant after two rounds of allotment had generated a lot of debate.

The P. A. Mohammed Committee intervened to ‘request' the managements to exhaust all students in the rank list before admitting anyone from outside. This time too the managements are likely to insist on such a clause.

Mr. Nayar, however, believes that the possibility of government seats remaining vacant even after five rounds of allotment is very slim. “But if seats are vacant then we would fill them up according the same provisions that existed last year,” Mr. Nayar explained.

Medical seats

The managements of self-financing medical colleges too are preparing to demand a hike in the fee. In fact, the managements that came up with a differential fee formula in 2009 are now saying that they want a uniform fee for all students admitted in their colleges. Sajan Prasad, the spokesman of the association of managements of self-financing colleges, told The Hindu- EducationPlus that the P. A. Mohammed Committee has already written to the colleges asking them to suggest fees for the next three years.

“Last year the committee fixed a fee of Rs.2.40 lakh to Rs.2.68 lakh. This time we expect the fee to be increased to the Rs.3 lakh-Rs.3.5 lakh band. There has been a hike in the minimum wages and a hike in the salaries of doctors. Our costs have gone up significantly and we need a hike. Courts have come down on differential fee rates. This is why we are going to propose the uniform fee,” Mr. Sajan explained.

If the government does agree to a uniform fee for all seats, it would be a strong incentive for colleges under the Christian managements also to open themselves up to allotments made by the CEE, Mr. Prasad pointed out.

Academics, parents and students who were much enthused when the R.V.G. Menon Committee on entrance reforms submitted its report are today a bemused lot. Even though it is three years since those recommendations were made, the government has not brought about any major change in the entrance examinations.

The most crucial of those recommendations is the preparation of the rank list by giving fifty-fifty weightage to the marks scored in the entrance examinations and in the qualifying examinations. The setting up of a question bank for various subjects and a limit on the number of chances a student is allowed to have to write the entrance examinations are among the other important recommendations. For the past two years, the government has adopted a ‘next-year' approach to implementing these reforms. This year too, no changes are expected in these examinations.

The government has held talks with various student organisations on the R.V.G. Menon Committee report. Once these organisations get back to the government with their suggestions, the report would be discussed once again by a cabinet subcommittee and then by the Cabinet. Mr. Menon himself has stated more than once that he does not see any reason for the delay in implementing the committee's recommendations.

A melting pot called entrance exam

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