More than 50,000 add up this year

• Total students goes up to 9.51 lakh
• Competition for tech courses to be Tough
• Few takers for Humanities

The admission process for first year Intermediate courses has ended after five extensions of last date. The total number of students enrolled both in government and private junior colleges this year was 9.51 lakhs, which is 50,000 more than last year. This means, if students of outside study are also included, more than 10 lakh students would appear for annual exams to be held in April 2014.

A total of 88.08 percentage of students in regular category have passed in the exams registering a 0.24 percent increase compared to last year (87.84%). Government schools have recorded an impressive 80.28 pass percentage and the schools which function under various government departments like Zilla parishad, Municipal, Social, Tribal welfare, Gurukul etc have also performed quite well compared to last few years. Private schools too fared well with 92.69 percentage. In addition, 51.49% of candidates of those who appeared for the SSC Advanced Supplementary Examinations have also passed. All this contributed to increase in admissions into first year Intermediate.

There was a marked increase in the admissions under science and commerce streams this year where as for Arts subjects, there was not much progress, compared to last year.

But academics take a big jolt as staff of almost all government junior colleges and majority of private junior colleges in 13 seemandhra districts have been on strike for the past 31 days against the decision to divide the state. The fresh students could not even attend for classes for a week when the agitations started.”This is bound to affect their studies in a big way as Intermediate is turning point in anybody’s career. There were no classes, no practicals” Janakirama Kolluru, a senior faculty of St Mary college in Visakhapatnam told The Hans India.

The revised syllabus was enforced from this year in full measure in both first and second year and students do need the help of lecturers. “They will be way behind the students of Class XI and Class XII of CBSE syllabus if they don’t follow the new syllabi. Eventually, it would have a telling effect on the results of national level exams at the end of senior Inter i.e. 2015” Dr V R Muralikrishna, a faculty at Narayana College said.

The competition will also be more in the next two years with the increase in number of students- especially for tech courses. The CBSE has given only a one time waiver this year for students of Andhra Pradesh with regard to computing plus two marks while making final merit lists of JEE Mains since the syllabus was not revised in the state at that time. From 2014 onwards, the marks of both first and second year Intermediate would be taken into account while calculating the weightage marks.

It would be a tough task ahead for Intermediate to manage the affairs if the agitations continue to rock for some more months.