The State Government has decided to once again challenge the higher minimum eligibility marks fixed by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) for admission into engineering colleges. This year, the AICTE had mandated that only students with a minimum aggregate score of 45 per cent would be eligible to enrol in BE/BTech courses under the Open Competition category. For students belonging to reserved categories (BC, MBC and SC/ST), the AICTE had fixed the minimum eligibility aggregate at 40%.
However, in TN, the prevailing policy allowed SC/ST students with a mere pass mark of 35 per cent to qualify for engineering admission. Soon after the AICTE notification came into force, the Higher Education Department had challenged it in the HC and sought to relax the norms to allow all Plus Two passed students to join engineering colleges. But, in a space of a week, Justices K Chandru and V Ramasubramanian had separately dismissed the pleas holding that relaxing norms would dilute the standards.
