Inter to carry 50 percent weightage in Eamcet

The state government has decided to increase the weight of intermediate marks in Eamcet from the existing 25 per cent to 50 per cent from 2011.

This is part of its longterm plan to phase out the Eamcet as the doorway to professional courses.

"It is ridiculous to have an entrance examination at this juncture," said a senior official. "We introduced the exam when there were only few seats and a large number of students. But now, the seats are more and students are less."

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Sibal makes it easy for students

The Union human resources development minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, proposed big bang education reforms, envisaging a single school board to be set up at the all-India level, replacing all state-level boards, and to make the board examination at the Class 10 level optional for students.

The minister said it was not possible to do away with the Class 10 board examination altogether for a number of reasons. Those students who do not intend to leave school or change schools after Class 10 should not have to sit for Class 10 board exams. For them internal assessments should be enough to move up to Class 11, he said.

Later, he cautioned students hopeful of immediate reforms that it was not going to happen this year, or even next year. Study hard, he urged them.

There was an urgent need to reform the entire process, he said, adding that this would be done after a consensus was arrived at with the state governments.

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Colleges worry over less forms

The applications for Eamcet-2009 saw a significant drop compared to last year ringing alarm bells in the minds of owners of over 530 engineering colleges in the state.

A hundred more institutions have also applied to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to start new engineering colleges in the state this year.

While the due date to apply for Eamcet without penalty ended on Wednesday, the Jawaharlal Technological UniversityHyderabad (JNTU), which is conducting Eamcet this year, has received 2,53,346 applications for the engineering and nearly 54,000 for medical stream.

Last year, there were 2,70,000 applicants for the engineering stream and 80,000 for the medical stream.

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Rupees 1m for engineering, 5m for medicine seats

The demand for management quota seats in both engineering and medical courses in the state has reached a new high this year with students paying Rs 10 lakh for an engineering seat and Rs 50 lakh for an MBBS seat.

Though the government prescribed fee for an engineering seat in management quota is Rs 83,000 and Rs 4 lakh for an MBBS seat, the huge demand for seats from parents and students has led college managements hiking the fee to exorbitant levels.

Even this has not deterred students and parents to seek admissions in these colleges, which are known to have “brand value”.

Most of the colleges have already closed admissions, although “unofficially,” as the norms of the state government does not permit them to start admissions without issuing notification for the purpose.

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New syllabus gives students sleepless nights at exam time

The reforms outlined by both: National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) may be good enough for bringing out analytical and reasoning abilities in students preparing for the highly-touted Std X and XII exams, but not by any means the way forward to destress students and prevent suicides.

Experts are viewing the examination as more stressful than ever before owing to uncertainty of the new curriculum and "out of syllabus" analytical or higher order thinking skills, popularly called HOTS. This is coupled with loss of appetite and sleep.

Though temporary, stress of this kind can turn to the more subtle chronic type with successive examinations performed under pressure. Peer pressure and post-exam analysis, in more serious terms, can destabilise memory and concentration and weaken the immune system, thereby limiting its ability to fight off even the most harmless of illnesses, warn experts.

According to them, the stress factor often goes unnoticed because the damage done gets blamed on other diseases and conditions. Apart from exerting mental pressure and psychological changes, physically, a child can experience heart pounding, headaches, sweaty palms, indigestion, sleeplessness, and a tight stomach under extreme circumstances - things likely to prevent one from giving their best shot. Researchers at Michigan State University say that exam pressure is more likely to impair the performance of good students than average ones by affecting their strong short-term or working memory that enables them to process numbers and thoughts while focusing on a problem.

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Image and Article source: Deccan Chronicle
Article taken from the issue: 5 Dec, 2007