Three years on, CUET has diminished universities
Written by Abha Dev Habib and Saikat Ghosh
A few years ago, summers at Delhi University (DU) would witness a festive clamour of students and parents visiting colleges to check out the infrastructure, meet faculty members, and submit their applications for admission to undergraduate courses. The demand was such that in many popular courses, despite the soaring cut-offs, admissions would close with the first list.
How things have changed. Now it takes multiple 'mop-up' rounds to complete admissions and the process goes on months after the start of classes. An RTI response shows that on average, 5,000 seats have remained vacant in every admission year since the introduction of the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) in 2022.
Admissions to undergraduate courses offered by central universities (CUs) through CUET were first announced in March 2022 while Class XII students were still struggling with Covid. Invoking the National Education Policy 2020, an overnight change in the admission policy was pushed despite educators having forewarned that CUET would downgrade the importance of Class XII board exams while encouraging a mushrooming of the private coaching industry and proxy schools. The CBSE-based CUET also disregarded the importance of state boards and the federal character.
Three years since, has CUET meant anything besides 'mop-up' rounds for DU?
A few days back, the National Testing Agency (NTA) declared that it would start the CUET-UG 2025 exams from May 13 rather than May 8. Lack of preparedness was reportedly the reason.
Delays and ineptitude have consistently been part of the CUET-UG story, throwing teaching-learning processes out of gear. DU's perpetually staggered academic calendar is testimony to this chaos, while the inordinate hold-ups in its UG admissions are the principal reason behind seats remaining vacant. Uncertainties have pushed many students to prefer private universities. Seats in several courses remain vacant despite multiple rounds of admissions including embarrassing 'mop-up' rounds based on Class XII scores.
Science streams, which have to compete with medicine, engineering and other technical courses, are the most affected. Even slight delays precipitate anxiety in students and parents and indeed, convince them about the futility of taking admissions if students want to reappear for JEE and NEET.
In a knee-jerk response to this issue, the university declared that all courses across colleges would take 20 per cent extra students. While this scheme failed to address the real problem, it resulted in over-admission in some disciplines across certain colleges, thereby skewing the normative student-teacher ratio.
Delayed admissions also mean that the university is forced to function with a different academic calendar for the freshly admitted batch of students as classes in other semesters begin even as the admission process is held to ransom by the CUET results. Staggered calendars have increased the stress on the system. Universities are designed to operate well within synchronised teaching-examination calendars for all years of students. A large system like DU shifts gears from teaching to examinations, dedicating its resources to one activity at a time.
Staggered calendars result in administrative chaos and cause further delays. When senior batches are appearing for their end-semester exams, the first-year classes are still going on. Teachers are expected to combine teaching with invigilation and evaluation duties. Timetables are disrupted, allotted classrooms are taken up for the conduct of examinations and some colleges even shift their classes online. The results of all batches are delayed as teachers are unable to travel to central evaluation facilities from their respective colleges, where teaching and invigilation take up all their duty hours.
Beyond classrooms, co-curricular activities and student societies have been adversely affected as students of various years are in different phases of their studies and are unable to interact much. Caught in examinations for one batch or the other, colleges find it difficult to schedule their cultural fests.
Post-CUET, admissions to DU have reported an alarming decline in the regional diversity of students and an even more steep fall in the relative number of female students. Conventionally, DU admissions based on Class XII scores assumed a parity between marks awarded by various state and central boards, thereby enabling students from far-flung states and regions of India to seek admission. A student's journey from a small village to Delhi would start once she scored well.
The CBSE-centric CUET insidiously favours only a privileged section of aspirants. Others are expected to spend on private coaching to be on par with students from CBSE schools. Inadequate test centres, frequent paper leaks, lack of evenly laid-out digital infrastructure and the myopic switch to a purely computer-based test have destroyed many dreams of students who are from the hinterland or economically distressed communities. The rising cost of admissions and the attendant uncertainties have also discouraged parents from encouraging girls from remote areas to apply.
Admissions to central universities through CUET-UG are a case of over-centralisation. While top private universities continue to run their admissions-related processes and schedules independent of NTA functioning, the hands of public-funded CUs are tied. In the case of DU, which offers close to 79,000 seats out of a total of 1.5 lakh seats available across CUs, this means an adverse impact on admissions and the teaching-examination cycle. For DU colleges and many other, newer central universities that cater to local populations, CUET is an unnecessary barricade that has demotivated students.
Paper leaks and delays have put an indelible question mark on the NTA's credibility. It is important to review CUET-UG-based admissions. To restore their national character and a modicum of order in their functioning, CUs need to recover their autonomous practices, including admissions. The normalisation of Class XII board results is a possible solution to the problem of disparate marking across boards.
Habib is associate professor, Physics Department, Miranda House and Ghosh is assistant professor, English Department, SGTB Khalsa College
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