University of Mumbai’s admission process for undergraduate courses is a nightmare: Students

The University of Mumbai’s (MU) online process for admissions to undergraduate (UG) courses is has become a nightmare for hundreds of aspirants, as the process is

The University of Mumbai’s (MU) online process for admissions to undergraduate (UG) courses is has become a nightmare for hundreds of aspirants, as the process is lengthy, time-consuming and expensive, students and parents have claimed. Over 2.25 lakh students had registered on the university portal until Tuesday evening.

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The university announced its schedule for the pre-admission online registration process on July 21. As per the earlier process, students had to take copies of pre-admission forms and submit them at colleges where they wanted to seek admissions, along with the admission forms. However, with the Covid-19 outbreak and the ensuing lockdown, the entire application process is being conducted online this year.

While the move is aimed to benefit aspirants in the current situation, students and parents said that the move is far from achieving its goal.

“The entire process is very tedious and not student-friendly. Students first have to fill a form for the university, which also includes filling individual college forms. Then the same process has to be repeated for every college on the college website. They then have to upload documents on the university portal for every college that they wish to apply in. All these steps involve taking prints, scanning them, uploading several documents and even after doing so much, there is still no clarity on several aspects,” said Vijay Patil, a parent from Thane.

Several parents also complained about the ambiguity on programme names on the university’s website.

“For an undergraduate commerce course, there are at least a dozen options, from autonomous to credit-based to specializations, which is very confusing for even educated parents, leave alone those whose children are first generation learners. Each college also has its own set of guidelines and documents and there is no uniformity. Students who are applying to multiple colleges take hours to fill each form,” said a parent from Goregaon.

While the university has given a helpline number and an online chat-based option for queries, many students said they could not connect with either of the options.

“I was constantly trying to call on the helpline number but it was busy throughout. When I tried writing my queries on the online chat box, I was asked to present my doubts between 10am and 6pm, though I had written to them during the stipulated time,” said Akash Gupta, an aspirant from Borivli. He added that many of his friends, who did not have a computer, are struggling to fill the forms as cyber cafes are shut in the city, owing to the lockdown. The university has not even provided previous years’ cut-offs, leaving students clueless about whether or not they can even get into a college of their choice.

Ashok Wadia, the principal of Churchgate’s Jai Hind College, said the college received several queries from students about the admission process.

“While we have given clear guidelines for our college form and made it simple, students did have some trouble with the university portal. Some college names were not appearing in the initial days and there was confusion about course names. Our staff has been helping students with the process,” he added.

A senior official from MU said that the admission process might look tedious right now, but the purpose of uploading all the scanned documents with pre-admission registration, as well as at the form-filling process, is to ensure that the documents are easy to verify at the time of admission.

“Since students will not be able to visit these colleges to submit documents, we are ensuring that every college the student applies to gets an easy access to the scanned documents,” said the official.

Students can call on 020-66834821 or fill out a form on MU’s portal to get answers to their questions.

THE PROCESS

Students have to register themselves on MU’s portal and upload their documents, including photo, signature, certificates, mark sheets and proof of residence.

After selecting a course from an exhaustive list, students have to mark the colleges in which they wish to apply. Then, an individual form for each of those colleges is generated and documents have to be uploaded for every application.

Each of the forms have to be printed, signed by the student, scanned and then kept ready for uploading at the college-level forms.

Students have to visit websites of individual colleges and repeat the whole process – fill information, upload documents including a university undertaking and then pay fees.