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Jr college top-rankers can’t find place in second merit list
As fingers raced across merit lists put up at colleges on Tuesday, Shirali Sheth looked furiously for her name on the list. Bhavya Dore reports.
As fingers raced across merit lists put up at colleges on Tuesday, Shirali Sheth looked furiously for her name on the list.
With 92.5% in the commerce stream, Sheth had topped HR College in the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) exams, but even that was not good enough to get into her own college for the BCom (Accounting and Finance - BAF), even in the second merit list, which closed at 93.8%.
The second list for various courses across city colleges was released on Tuesday. Sheth did make it to the first merit list of the BCom (Financial Markets - BFM) course at her college where the cutoff was 91% in the first list. Sheth’s first preference was the BAF course. “If the college topper can’t get in then what about the rest?” said Sheth. “This is really unfair.”
A plethora of high scorers from other boards have edged out state board (HSC) students, with even the best struggling to make it to coveted courses such as BAF in the first lists of the colleges of their first preference.
Though colleges have an in-house quota for the regular courses (BA, BSc, BCom), there is no such quota for self-financing courses such as BAF, BFM, Bachelor of Management Studies (BMS) and Bachelor of Mass Media (BMM). These are in great demand and invariably have higher cut-offs.
Similarly, Janhavi Lokegaonkar, who topped in the arts stream at Khalsa College in Matunga with 76% found herself nowhere on the first merit of Ruparel College, her first preference. She finally made in through on the second list on Tuesday. “I missed it by three marks in the first list,” said Lokegaonkar. State board students are seething at the perceived injustice of being unable to make it to their top choices of college, and in some cases their own college for undergraduate courses.
“Students perceive the disparity. Percentages of other boards are high,” said Ashok Wadia, principal of Jai Hind College in Churchgate.
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