Four out of the five undergraduate science departments at Jadavpur University have informed the admissions committee of the science faculty that they want to screen students for undergraduate courses through admission tests, JU officials said.
The departments, the officials said, do not want to be guided only by the inflated Plus-II board marks to determine who will be admitted.
The admissions committee recently sought feedback from the departments to decide on how the undergraduate aspirants would be screened.
Physics, chemistry, mathematics and geography departments have said they want the candidates to be screened on the basis of equal weightage to the admission test score and Plus-II board marks, said sources on the campus.
The geological science’s department has said it wants to continue with the practice of admitting candidates on the basis of Plus-II board marks.
Teachers of the mathematics department have specified that they want the applicants to be tested through short-answer type questions as that would help in ascertaining whether the candidates can pursue the course. “We are against multiple-choice questions because they don’t test the merit of an aspirant,” said Buddhadeb Sau, a teacher of the mathematics department.
The admissions committee will meet on June 22 to decide on the mechanism for admission. The committee decided to seek feedback at its meeting on June 8 where a number of science departments spoke in favour of screening students through admission tests.
The science departments at JU have traditionally admitted students based on their board marks, while the arts departments have over the years been screening students through admission tests.
A teacher of the physics department said they opted for an admission test so that candidates get a level playing field.
The school-leaving exams could not be completed in 2020 following the onset of the Covid pandemic. They could not be held at all last year because of a fresh wave in Covid cases.
In 2020, the state higher secondary council had taken the best marks of the papers the candidates had written before the lockdown and awarded those to the papers they could not write.
Last year, Class XII students were assessed based on their performance in the Class XI annual exams and the performance in the secondary exams.
As a result, a large number of students scored exceptionally high marks.
“Now, these candidates are eligible to apply for admissions. The students who wrote the papers this year and did not score as much have to compete with the students from the previous two batches. They will lose out in the competition if the applicants are screened based on board marks alone,” the teacher said.