Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Court strikes down order on Tamil Nadu entrance test

News from The Hindu: Court strikes down order on entrance test

This was expected. I don't think Jayalalitha was really serious in cancelling the entrance tests after conducting the tests. She didn't want to give political space to PMK and DMK.

After a bunch of aggrieved students went to court, DMK leader Karunanidhi, while welcoming the scrapping of the entrance exam, criticised Jayalalitha that the timing of the move was wrong. PMK's Ramadoss questioned Karunanidhi. Karunanidhi was quick to say that his views were the same as Ramadoss'. (How?)

It is speculated that the TN govt. may look at going to Supreme Court against this verdict. But that will unduly affect the students. Admissions to Arts & Sciences colleges across the state are over by now.

In the meantime, Ramadoss and PMK are on their feet attacking Jayalalitha again. That instead of merely bringing a Government Order, the Govt. should have promulgated an Ordinance! This is madness. A court will be well within its right to dismiss an Ordinance as well, since the Bench has remarked thus:
"In our opinion, if the State Government wanted to depart from the selection method laid down in the Regulations, it was incumbent on it to pass an Act or Ordinance and get the assent from the President. That has not been done. Even if that had been done, it is doubtful whether it would have been a valid law, since it would still be in violation of Article 14 of the Constitution. The GO is not a law which has received the assent of the President. (emphasis mine)
Therefore it is clear that an Ordinance may still not escape the judicial review. Ramadoss would do better to consult some lawyers on what the process should be to achieve his goals.

The self-financing engineering colleges themselves were asking for removal of the entrance exam. Now they will have to either quickly conduct an exam of their own, or accept the marks obtained by the students in the exam conducted by the Government.

Tamil nadu Engineering colleges have close to 80,000 seats and it appears that the demand is less than the supply in engineering. However, when it comes to Medical, the demand is heavy. The number of seats are less than 4,000. It is quite possible in future to have more than 4,000 students, all having 200/200 in Physics, Chemistry and Biology all wanting to get into the Medical Colleges in the state.

Therefore, even if an entrance exam is not needed for the engineering courses, it will be needed for the medical colleges. Further, Medical Council of India "had made it clear that in States having more than one medical college or one university board or examining body an entrance examination was mandatory." The bench has also observed that "Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court [has stated that] all the MCI Regulations were mandatory and not directive."

Thus, the best the Tamil Nadu Government can do is delink medical and engineering entrance exams for the next year, scrap the engineering entrance exam and allow the medical entrance exam to continue.

4 comments:

  1. I think it would be a good idea to scrap the entrance exam altogether and come up with some normalization mechanism to ensure that students across all the various (thousands?) educational systems (state, cbse, isc, matriculation?, anglo-indian, tibetan, kuppusami board, lalu yadav board etc.) are judged uniformly with respect to each other.

    Imo, the big mistake Jayalalitha made was in making the order effective the current year, which affected so many students who'd put in hours of effort. My guess is that she may have had her way if she had declared that the order would be effective from the next school year. People would have protested, no doubt. All these entrance examination coaching centres would have lobbied. But the scale would have been far less than what happened eventually.

    jagadish

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear jagadish,

    I disagree with you for the following reasons.

    1. THe normalising procedure is impractical because of various variations

    a. Different Systems
    b. Different Years - Say I get 99.5 % in CBSE Final Year and my father cannot afford to send me to college this year. Next year my father has money and I want to join the college. How will you equate MY marks (scored WITH THIS years questions paper) with marks of other students who had to write a difficult question paper
    c. Valuation Difference - School Final Year Papers are corrected by PERSONS and each one gives his own marks...... You Correct 100 papers and I will correct 100 papers... Can you say that we will give identical marks to all the papers....... In a competetion where you loose a career by 0.01 marks, we should have a system that DOES NOT HAVE ANY INHERENT BIAS and Entrance (corrected by Computer) is the best system

    ReplyDelete
  3. Then whats the point of the school
    leaving exam? Either we have only a
    school leaving exam or only entrance
    exam(s). Not both.

    ReplyDelete
  4. //Then whats the point of the school
    leaving exam? Either we have only a
    school leaving exam or only entrance
    exam(s). Not both.//

    Really....

    Then do you mean to say that there is no need of Civil Service Exams and the university first ranker be made the collector of the district

    Will you ask all the private companies to do away with the recruitment process

    Then we can dissolve UPSC, TNPSC and all service commissions

    ----
    The school leaving exam is to determine whether the student has studied what he has to study in teh school

    It should be only PASS FAIL. Marks are not needed in that

    Marks are needed only in entrance

    ----

    If you analyze 2007 MBBS Admission, you can see that the number of students from Villages have DECREASED :) :) :)

    Please see
    http://bruno.penandscale.com/2006/02/about-entrance-and-exit-exams.html
    http://bruno.penandscale.com/2006/02/entrance-of-exit.html
    http://bruno.penandscale.com/2006/02/more-about-entrance-saga.html

    ReplyDelete