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Delhi

UGC rolls back selection rules for MPhil, PhD admissions

New Delhi: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has decided to roll back the selection rules for research students it had notified in 2016, which accorded full weightage to oral interviews, or viva voce, for admission to PhD and MPhil programmes, Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers' Association (JNUTA) said in a statement on Friday.
Meanwhile, the JNU Students' Union (JNUSU) said that two years of "uncomprising struggle nailed the UGC's anti social justice designs and forced them to retract."
The UGC, on Thursday, amended clauses of the UGC Gazette Notification, dated May 5, 2016, which gave 100 percent weightage to viva voce or interviews for final selection and brought it back to the 70-30 per cent model, i.e. 70 per cent weightage to written test and 30 per cent weightage to oral interview.
The Commission also approved a five per cent relaxation in the cut-off for clearing the written test entrance test to SC, ST, OBC, PwD candidates.
As a result, instead of the earlier minimum 50 per cent marks that reserved category students had to score in the written test, now they will only have to score 45 per cent to qualify for the interview stage.
"The Commission has also relaxed five percentage points in the minimum marks to be scored in the written test taken by SC, ST and OBC candidates. This means that while a general candidate will have to secure at least 50 per cent in the entrance examination to qualify for the interview or viva voce, a candidate from the reserved category will need to score 45 percent," a member of JNUSU said.
The JNUTA statement further read that when the Gazette was introduced in JNU in 2016, it brought massive devastation by wiping-off a generation of students from research courses through arbitrary caps on supervisor-student ratios and, thus, swinging massive cuts in the number of seats.
"Even more insidious was the uniform 50 per cent qualifying clause for written and the 100 per cent viva, which led to a near extinction of the presence of students from the weaker sections in the research courses," the statement read.
The UGC, in 2016, had introduced new regulations, which stipulated that students seeking admission into MPhil or PhD courses will be required to score a minimum of 50 percent in the entrance test, as would also be Dalit, tribal and other backward classes students.
The UGC (Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of M.Phil/PhD Degrees) Regulations 2016, however, provided for a five per cent relaxation in the eligibility criteria for SC, ST and OBC students to apply.
JNUTA said that the battle against the UGC Gazette has been long and hard.
"When it was introduced, the JNUSU fought tooth and nail exposing the machinations of both UGC and JNU in order to reduce seats and kill social justice," said its statement.
Moreover, JNUSU said that opened legal battles in this issue, which were followed up by more and more cases from various individuals and organisations, as the impact of the Gazette intensified.
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