UoH entrance test from February 1

Bowing to intense pressure from many students unions, the authorities of University of Hyderabad have lifted cut off mark norm for all categories including general and OBC category aspirants from the next admission test onwards. Releasing the schedule in Hyderabad on Monday, the authorities have clarified that they have done it to enable more students to get admission, especially from OBC sections.

According to Prof Rajasekhar, Registrar of the University, 86 per cent of seats in all sections were filled up in the last academic year. “Going by statistics, some of the OBCs have been admitted under general category. Out of 27 per cent quota for OBCs, only 18-19 per cent were taken from those sections and the remaining have gone in ‘general’ pool.

There was no cut off norm for SC and ST students in any case. So, the only way to correct this is to lift off the norm for the admission test” he explained. The authorities are now expecting that the admissions may cross 90 per cent mark this year, if no cut off mark is enforced.

The student unions have organised a day-long dharna recently protesting against the cut off norm. They even barged into VC’s chamber and demanded to lift cut off mark and Vice-Chancellor Prof Ramakrishna Ramaswamy assured he would take up the matter in the Executive Council meeting.

The entrance examinations for all Post-graduate courses, diploma courses, PhDs and MPhil will commence from February 1, 2014 and ends on February 7. The schedule was further advanced as it was held after the first week of February for the present academic year. The exams would be for two hours in two sessions – from 10 am to 12 noon and 2 pm to 4 pm. They would start with MCA and M Sc vision sciences on Februray 1 morning and MSc Chemistry, MSc Earth Sciences, IMA Humanities and PhD Gender Studies on the same day afternoon.

Two more examination centres have been added this year, making it to 35. There will be ten centres in Andhra Pradesh, four in Telangana, three each in Andhra and Rayalaseema regions, according to Prof Venkateswara Rao, Controller of Examinations. The notification will be released on Tuesday (December 3) and online registration would commence from December 4 and end on January 3.

The entrance is for 130 programmes. Two more diploma courses have been added this year viz PG Diploma in Children Theatre and PG diploma in sanskrit computational linguistics, Prof Venkateswara Rao disclosed. The results are expected to be announced by April 15 or latest by 20. The interviews for all conventional post graduate courses would commence from May 6 and the interviews for PhD programmes will start from May 7 onwards. The university plans to wind up the entire admission process by May 9.

In another relief for students, the authorities have decided to charge the amount that is reimbursed to the reserved category students as the fee for certain courses. Till now, the fee that is charged is more than the reimbursed amount. In a recent meeting of the Executive Council, it was decided to do away with the excess fee system and charge whatever the amount that is given by government of Andhra Pradesh towards fee for students belonging to SC, ST, BC and other differently-abled categories.