New faculties, degrees and courses available for State university students

Thirteen new faculties, 65 new degrees and 90 post-graduate courses have been made available for students, University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman Sampath Amaratunge, said recently.

The chairman announced this at a media conference on Friday after releasing the university admission cut-off marks for the 2021 A/L exams that were held this year.

Accordingly, from the 283,616 candidates who sat for the 2021 A/L exams, 171,497 were eligible for university admission. Out of this number, only 91,115 applied to universities and only 41,228 were selected.

Prof. Amaratunge said the re-scrutinised results had not been released yet and thereby the number selected for university admission this year, excluded additional intakes and special intakes, while last year 43,927 students, inclusive of additional intakes and special intakes were admitted to the universities.

Moreover, the UGC Chairman said this year’s university admission was different from the previous years’ admission as the Cabinet decision which allowed the UGC to conduct their activities, before the rescrutinised results were released. This “usually takes many months”, the Chairman added.

However, the Z-score of the candidates who had not applied for re-scrutiny would not change with the changes of Z-scores for other students and the candidates who were already selected to universities would not be affected.

The highest stream-wise intake was for the Arts with 11,314 students, followed by Biological Science with 9,749 students, Physical Science with 8,020 students, Commerce with 7,701 students, Engineering Technology with 2,236 students, Biosystems Technology with 1,543 students and 665 students for the other streams.

The university admission cut-off marks could be accessed on www.ugc.ac.lk.

Candidates would be informed on the registration for the selected course and the university within two weeks through SMS and emails, where appeals could be made only within 30 days. Other changes could also only be made online.

Explaining the new courses, Prof. Amaratunge cited the example of Creative Music Technology and Production in the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. He said technology was increasingly brought into new courses, to prevent Arts students from unemployment, while courses with more jobs such as those in the Medicine and Engineering faculties were expanded.

Information regarding cut-off marks could accessed through the UGC Information Centre numbers 0112695301, 0112695302, 0112692357 and 0112675854, and by sending a SMS to 1919 typing ugc.