DU seats filling up faster with more ‘realistic’ cut-offs

NEW DELHI: Delhi University has approved applications at an “unprecedented” rate in the first two days of admissions this year because of more realistic cut-offs, according to people familiar with the developments.

With admissions to around 10% of the available seats already approved, many popular courses in the more sought-after institutions may not be available after the first list, said principals of three top colleges.

Though the process was stalled due to technical glitches on the first day, admission numbers started picking up after 1pm on Tuesday. By 6pm on Wednesday, around 6,500 admissions had been approved by colleges, and around 3,000 students had paid the admissions fees and confirmed their seats, MK Pandit, a member of the university admission committee said.

Last year, by the end of three days of admissions under the first list, the university had completed only 2,201 admissions. The total number of seats in undergraduate courses is around 56,000.

“Earlier, the colleges would not know the cut-offs for other colleges, so they would announce higher cut-offs . But this time, we asked them to announce a tentative list that could be seen by all. The colleges then adjusted their cut-offs and announced a realistic list,” Patil said.

The admission under the first cut-off list will end on Thursday at 1pm for regular colleges and 7pm for evening colleges. The second list will be announced on June 25. Some popular colleges, such as Lady Shri Ram (LSR), Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), Hindu, Gargi and Daulat Ram College, are unlikely to announce a second cut-off list for some of their more popular courses as they have already over-admitted students or are confident that they will fill the seats by Thursday.

At Hindu, an admission committee member said that they had over-admitted students to History (Hons) and Political Science (Hons). At Daulat Ram, Physics (Hons), Economics (Hons), Psychology (Hons), and Chemistry (Hons) had more takers than the number of seats, according to principal Savita Roy. Daulat Ram had reduced the cut-offs for all popular courses, other than Economics, by up to 2 percentage points from last year. The first cut-off for Economics (Hons) was 96.5%, the same as last year. SRCC has admitted 367 students in B.Com (Hons) out of a total of 501 seats, while 92 admissions have been completed in Economics (Hons), which has 123 seats.

“A second cut-off list looks difficult if we have similar number of admissions tomorrow as we have done in first two days,” said SRCC’s principal Simrit Kaur.