B.Sc. graduates can join second year engineering
	CHENNAI: Science graduates will now be able to scale up their qualifications by taking an engineering degree. Those with a B.Sc. degree with mathematics as a subject and 60 per cent aggregate at the U.G. level can gain lateral entry into the second year or III semester of the B.E./B.Tech course. The All India Council for Technical Education, the body responsible for providing guidelines for student admissions to technical education, recently notified the new regulations for lateral admission to engineering programmes. Till now, only students with a diploma in engineering could enter (laterally) the second year or the III semester of the four-year/eight-semester B.E./B.Tech course. The regulations were notified in January. The colleges were informed about the development and change in regulations early this month, college management sources say. Para 6.2 (a) of the notification issued by the AICTE dated 12-01-2007 under Sec. 23 and Sec 10 (b), (o) and (v) of the AICTE Act noted that science education in the country had suffered primarily due to lack of employment opportunities for all the science graduates. This trend affected science education in the country. As a means of providing students avenues for proper and better job opportunities after graduating, science graduates may be permitted to join engineering courses in the second year along with diploma holders through lateral entry. Only candidates fulfilling the conditions would be eligible for appearing in the entrance test meant for selecting such graduates to the B.E./B.Tech programme. "The selection of candidates will be based on an entrance test, the merit ranking in the test being the basis for admission." Enquiries among the college heads show that normally students with Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Applications, Computer Sciences and Computer Technology, have more than two papers of mathematics as an ancillary subject during under graduation. The 250 affiliating colleges and more than a dozen private universities have a combined intake of over 90,000 seats. The AICTE norms allow a later intake of a maximum 10 per cent of the sanctioned strength, over and above the approved intake (supernumerary). In addition these candidates can be admitted to the second year in those seats that were vacant in the first year. "The admission authority concerned shall decide the ratio between the diploma holders and B.Sc. graduates for admission... ," the new regulations added. Reacting to the development, senior academic V.C. Kulandai Swamy noted that earlier engineering colleges such as the Madras Institute of Technology (MIT) had a robust three-year B.Tech course meant for science graduates. "The best the AICTE could have done was to revive this programme, which was in demand among many companies, graduates and parents. Now a person with the maturity of a graduate will have to sit with students who have completed school or an engineering diploma and study the same B.E. course for three years. Graduates actually require a different kind of 3-year B.E programme," he noted.