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50 students from one Tamil Nadu school crack admissions at SRCC
50 students from one Tamil Nadu school secured admission in SRCC on the first day of Commerce (H) admissions. This has raised many eyebrows. For the school this is the third year that a high number of students have secured admission at SRCC.
It will not be an exaggeration to say that nowadays college admissions are examined as extensively as political election results. So intense is the scrutiny that every little detail is revealed to a casual reader. So when this year it was revealed that 110 of the 160 candidates who secured an admission to the BCom (H) course at Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) on the first day of the entry process were from Tamil Nadu it raised quite a few eyebrows.
What’s equally bewildering is that 50 of these students came from one school: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Erode. This statistic has left many, including the SRCC faculty wondering how one institution could produce so many students capable of breaching the qualification barrier for acceptance into one of the top commerce colleges of the country.
R P Rastogi, principal, SRCC, asserted: "All admissions have been done on merit."
However, a few staff members involved in the admission process shared that upon casually asking some basic questions, some of the Tamil Nadu aspirants were unable to give satisfactory responses. The teachers said many of the candidates appeared "very average, unlike what their marks show".
There exist no such doubts in the minds of the teachers at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Last year, 36 of its students made it to SRCC while the year before that saw 28 students making the cut. "Of late Shri Ram College in Delhi and Christ College in Bangalore have been big attractions for our students," explained N S Karthikeyani, principal, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.
However, the fact that some students were unable to answer the questioned posed by SRCC teachers seems to reinforce the belief that residential schools in western TN promoted rote learning, leaving Karthikeyani on the back foot, saying, "Maybe the questions at SRCC were presented in a way our students are not used to." PC Jain, who had conducted 9 admission sessions as former principal of the college, validated the fact that absorption from Tamil Nadu and Kerala boards had indeed risen steadily in recent years.
"With Delhi University (DU) becoming an attractive proposition, education boards of other states went into competitive mode to assure admissions for their students by giving them high marks," said Jain. "DU has never rationalised the marks and all state boards are treated as equals," Jain said
Saying that the state boards should focus on quality of education and not on inflation of marks, Jain said, "As per the new education policy under deliberation, an all India test like the Scholastics Aptitude Test is under consideration for college admissions."