Currently, there has been a controversy over the admission process of first year Junior colleges in Maharashtra. This year the S. S. C. results were very good, much better than the previous years. More people passed, but the number of seats didn't increase with the same pace. Hence, the obvious question of admission.
The state came up with 2 solutions. One with a district quota of 70 per cent which I think was totally foolish. If there are not enough seats to accommodate all the students then what's the point of reserving seats for locals. And how will you break the regions? Who are locals and who are outsiders?
The second one, which I thought was a good solution, used percentile system to normalize scores of students of all three boards( SSC., ICSE and CBSE). The percentile will be calculated by finding your score with respect to the average score of top ten students of that board. It has been challenged in the courts.
Personally, I thought it was a good move by state because I have seen ICSE and CBSE people all over the Ruparel admission list. When I applied for Electronics in Ruparel, I was the only open candidate student from SSC board in a list of 23 students, rest all being ICSE or CBSE. I have seen my dear friend Aditya searching for admission all over Mumbai even after getting 70+ per cent. And really, what do these ICSE people lose because of percentile system? If they are really the toppers, they will automatically have a high percentile. Similar technique was used by BITS, Pilani. I thought Hindustan Times has been a bit partial in this case. They have reported stories of people from ICSE board who didn't get the admission in the colleges they would have liked. But the truth is, how many actually get their dream college? There was one girl who got 86 per cent (88 in percentile)and wanted admission in Ruia. Now, her argument was that if she was in SSC board with same per cent she would have got 89 percentile which has the cutoff at Ruia. My argument is that how can she say that she could get the same marks in SSC? Because, SSC and ICSE are different patterns with different style of marking schemes. Some times I used to feel in my school days why we have 100 marks in Marathi, when you can never get out of marks in any subjective question. And then I saw ICSE/CBSE people with 90+ marks in languages. OK. I agree some of them were really great people, but then you must joking when you say you got 95 in English.
Some people may say that it was all too easy for me to get admission at my time, but does that make points invalid? When you make list colleges where you want to apply, don't you need have list of cutoffs? Can't people find out that this year the results were very high as compared to last year, so it is obvious that cutoff will go up substantially and hence to have a back college in mind, in case things go wrong? I feel sorry for the people who have not got the admission, but there is always a hope. FYJC is not everything. One can try diploma in engineering, ITI, computer courses, draftsman course. As is said if there is a will, then there is a way, if you have desire for education, then you will get an institute that will be help you.
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