Over 3,000 undergraduate seats remain vacant at various colleges under Delhi University (DU) following the mop-up round of admissions.

The trend of vacant seats has become increasingly common since the university shifted to a centralised entrance system for student selection.

Faculty members from different colleges attribute the issue to delays in the results of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), along with technical issues related to the choice-filling process on the admission portal.

Before the implementation of the CUET in 2022, DU admitted students based on their Class XII scores. The university introduced the Common Seat Allocation System (CSAS) portal to facilitate centralised applications for multiple institutions and courses.

After the regular admission rounds, 4,759 seats were reported as vacant on the DU website. In late September, the university initiated the mop-up round, allowing candidates to apply based on their Class XII marks for the available seats.

Anoop Lather, DU's public relations officer, confirmed that as of October 6 evening, colleges had admitted 1,137 students, who were required to pay fees by the following evening.

Pankaj Garg, a professor at Rajdhani College, expressed concerns that the vacant seat matrix for the mop-up round did not accurately reflect the actual number of available seats.

"There are seats vacant in the science stream in our college. But the vacant seat matrix did not show the vacancy accurately. The number of vacant seats will be more than the official data suggests,” Garg said.

DU has over 70,000 seats in UG regular courses in 69 colleges. In 2022 and 2023, nearly 5,000 and 7,000 seats remained vacant, respectively.

Abha Dev Habib, a Miranda House College faculty member, said that the university should go back to marks-based admissions. The university had planned to start the admissions in July but it could start only in the last week of August.

"The NTA has never held the CUET and declared the results on time. The students after waiting for long took admission to private universities where classes started in July. It is not easy for them to give up and join DU in September.

"Some students might have preferred to drop admission and prepare for competitive tests for engineering and medical. But seats remaining vacant show the CUET-based admission has failed in DU,” Habib said.

She added that the CUET has led to a proliferation of private coaching, neglect of Class XI and XII studies to prepare for entrances and a decrease in admissions of rural and female students who could not afford coaching.

"When the university allows students to take admissions based on Class XII marks in the mop-up round, it can do so for admissions for all rounds. The CUET being a national test picks up candidates from across the country who do not turn up and the local students are not getting a chance,” Habib said.

Under the present CSAS, neither the student nor the college knows the cut-off for any course. Now each student has to mention a hierarchy of subject-cum-college preferences right at the outset and the system then allots a particular course at a college based on CUET scores and preferences.