Summary
Several faculty members said 30 to 40 per cent seats were vacant in the science and commerce streams at several DU colleges
Delhi University has
failed to fill undergraduate seats in nearly 60 colleges even after three usual
rounds of seat allocations and two rounds of spot admissions, raising the spectre
of a repeat of the large-scale vacancies seen last year.
Many
faculty members blame the situation on the university’s “opaque and
centralised” undergraduate admission regime, the Common Seats Allocation
Systems (CSAS), which it adopted last year.
The
CSAS forces applicants to spell out their course and college preferences before
the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) results are out. It subsequently
restricts the applicants’ freedom to change their choices after they learn
their CUET scores and the situation regarding the availability of seats becomes
clearer.
The
university has not revealed the number of vacant seats so far. However, it has
announced a special round of spot admissions next week.
Several faculty members
said 30 to 40 per cent seats were vacant in the science and commerce streams at
several DU colleges.
A DU notification on Thursday said the
university would display the vacancies on Monday to enable the candidates to
apply by Wednesday. The process will be over by Saturday.
DU is India’s largest university and attracts students from
across the country. Over 5,000 of the nearly 70,000 undergraduate seats the
university offers remained vacant last year after DU began admitting students on the basis of their CUET
scores — rather than their board exam scores — and introduced the CSAS as well.
CSAS
labyrinth
The
CSAS allots a student a particular course at a particular college based on her
CUET scores and the preferences she had spelt out beforehand.
If
the student wants to change her preferences during subsequent rounds of the
online CSAS, held to fill seats left vacant after the initial rounds, she can
only go up and not down her preference list.
Say,
the preferences a student had mentioned are, in descending order, economics
hons, political science hons, history hons, home science hons and BA
(non-hons).
If
she has been allotted history and later wants to change her preference, she can
only choose economics or political science — if seats are available in these
subjects — but not home science or BA (non-hons) even if her marks are good
enough to secure admission to these courses.
The
spot admissions do offer students the option of going down the list of
preferences too. But many applicants tend not to wait for the spot admissions
and play it safe by grabbing seats at other, usually private, universities.
The DU admission process has been dragging
for a month and a half now, with classes having started on August 16.
Till
2021, individual DU colleges
set their own cut-offs for each subject, admitting students on the basis of
their Class XII marks. So, the students had a complete picture of which courses
they might be able to enrol in and at which college. After admission, they
could change their college and course, subject to availability, without
artificial restrictions.
Quota seat
trauma
A
sizeable proportion of the vacant seats at DU tend
to be those reserved for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and the Other
Backward Classes.
Rajesh
Jha, a faculty member at Rajdhani College, said the majority of these students
— mostly from vernacular-medium schools in rural areas — do not just find the
CUET (based on the CBSE syllabus) daunting but also lack guidance in navigating
the CSAS maze.
“This
online CSAS system is very opaque. It also denies a level playing field to
rural students who are not so well-versed in understanding and operating the
online CSAS,” Jha said. “The CUET is mostly taken by the students from
English-medium schools.”
Delhi
social welfare minister Raaj Kumar Anand has written to DU vice-chancellor Yogesh Singh
requesting that the admission process be continued till all the reserved seats
are filled.
Last updated on 16 Sep 2023
