Chennai/New Delhi: The fact that 110 of the 160 candidates offered admission to the BCom (H) course at Shri Ram College of Commerce on the first day of the entry process were from Tamil Nadu made startling news. Strikingly, of this crowd from the southern state, 50 came from one school: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Erode, leaving many , including the Delhi college faculty , wondering how one institution could produce so many students capable of breaching the qualification barrier for acceptance into one of the top commerce colleges of the country.

R P Rastogi, principal, SRCC, asserted: "All admissions have been done on merit."

But some staff involved in the admission process told TOI that they had casually subjected some of the Tamil Nadu aspirants to very basic questioning and found them unable to give satisfactory responses.The teachers said many of the candidates appeared "very average, unlike what their marks show". Merit, in the admission process, is determined by the marks obtained by the students in their Class XII examinations. So there are no such doubts in the minds of the teachers at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Last year, 36 of its students made it to SRCC; the year earlier, 28 students did. "Of late Shri Ram College in Delhi and Christ College in Bangalore have been big attractions for our students,"explained N S Karthikeyani, principal, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

"SRCC is known for admissions based purely on merit and this is an advantage for us as we produce many centum scorers. "Last year, the school had 162 students in the commerce stream. Of them, 53 students secured 100% in commerce, 61 in accountancy , 48 in business maths and 11 in economics.

C Sribuvan, a student of the school, said that he and others were determined to get into SRCC right from Class XI and followed a tough preparatory course. "I wanted to pursue civil services after commerce and was advised to apply for this college,"he said. "By the time we faced our board exams, we had taken some 20 exams and we felt best prepared."

Shrimann Adhith added: "From Day 1 of Class XI, we were taught meticulously and it has mainly been a conceptoriented approach, not mugging up."

However, the fact that some students were unable to answer the questioned posed by SRCC teachers seemed to reiterate the belief that residential schools in western TN promoted rote learning, leaving Karthikeyani on the back foot, saying, "Maybe the questions at SRCC were presented in a way our students are not used to."PC Jain, who had conducted nine admission sessions as former principal of the college, said absorption from Tamil Nadu and Kerala boards had indeed risen steadily in recent years.

"With Delhi University becoming an attractive proposition, education boards of other states went into competitive mode to assure admissions for their students by giving them high marks,"said Jain. "Delhi University has never rationalised the marks and all state boards are treated as equals,"Jain said.

Jain confirmed that in the past three years, there were all indications that students from Tamil Nadu and Kerala were making steady inroads in Delhi University's admissions process.

Saying that the state boards should focus on quality of education and not on inflation of marks, Jain said, "As per the new education policy under deliberation, an all India test like the Scholastics Aptitude Test is under consideration for college admissions."



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