Engg counselling: 36% wait for better seats in 1st round

Chennai: In view of a new rule mandating payment of tuition fee within seven days of allotment of seats, at least one-in-three students who had taken part in the first round of online engineering counselling have been delaying the decision to accept seats, awaiting better seats/courses.
Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) committee invited 14,524 students with cut-off marks from 200 to 184.5 for the first round of counselling.The counselling started on September 10 and provisional allotment was issued on September 15 following the choice filling and confirmation of tentative allotment.

"Of the 14,546 students, 12,294 have filled their choices and tentative allotment released for 11,595 students. Of them, 5,233 students have accepted the provisional allotment and 4,269 have opted for better allotment (upward movement) within the same round," said T Purushothaman, secretary, TNEA.
Students who have accepted the allotment need to pay their tuition fees within seven days (September 22) in the respective colleges while students who have opted for upward movement need to pay the fees at the nearest TNEA facilitation centres chosen by them.
"Students have given options wisely by comparing the previous years' cut-off marks. A student ranked around 12,000 gave the maximum number of 537 choices in the first round," Purushothaman added.
The new rule will give students better allotments, as the vacant seats can be filled in the same round with meritorious students by giving them upward movement. In the first round, around 3,000 seats are vacant and those seats of students who did not pay the fees within the time also will be added to the vacant seats before giving them upward movement.
Officials said students have a better chance to get upward movement compared to previous years in online counselling.
Career consultant Jayaprakash Gandhi said that of the 12,000 students who had taken part in the counselling, a majority of them opted for the computer science engineering branch followed by IT and electronics and communication engineering.