CHENNAI:Mirroring the continuing trend of students preferring medical degrees over engineering courses, as many as 757 students of the 2017 called for BE/B Tech counselling on day one of TNEA 2015 stayed away, registering 37.53 per cent absentee percentage. This is an increase of a little over seven per cent from last year, when the absentee percentage was 30.43 per cent.
Of the total students called, 1256 were allotted seats. According to statistics from TNEA, a community-wise split of the 1256 candidates reveals that not even one candidate from the BC, MBC, BC (Muslim), SC, SC (Arunthathiyar), ST communities preferred to join a self-financing college. Only 70 candidates from the Open Competition category preferred to take a seat in one of the 504 self financing colleges in the State.
As expected, ECE and Mechanical streams had the most takers. While ECE topped with 355 takers, Mechanical followed close with 313. CSE came third with 245 students choosing it while the other stream to have triple figure takers was EEE with 100 candidates opting for it. True to its reputation, Mechanical stream continued to be favoured by boys overwhelmingly. Of the 313 students who chose Mechanical, 307 were boys. ECE was the favourite among girls with 207 of the 355 seats allotted to girls. Both Mechanical and ECE had 89 first generation college-goers.
Computer Science Engineering was balanced out as 120 boys and 125 girls preferred the course. Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering suffered the worst with only seven seats allotted. IT course had only 41 takers proving the diminishing interest among students.
Counselling on day one was held over six sessions. However, starting July 2, counselling will be conducted over eight sessions.