CHENNAI: Students, who enrolled with the Institute of Distance Education (IDE) of the University of Madras and cannot complete the full course, have something to cheer about. If they had enrolled in any postgraduate, undergraduate and certificate courses and could manage to complete only half of the course, then the students are now eligible to get certificates depending on the amount of portion covered by them.
For benefit of students, the University of Madras has introduced a new system, conversion of degree programmes into diploma. The students, who managed to finish only one year of the degree course, will be awarded a diploma. However, the candidates will have to pay requisite fees for it and have to complete specific credits as well.
The university syndicate gave the approval for implementation of the new norm on Tuesday. Vice-chancellor of the University, P Duraisamy said if a student, who enrolled for a professional degree like MBA, MCA, M.SC(IT) in the IDE course, has earned 40 credits or passed 10 courses in semester pattern or 5 annual courses in non semester pattern, is eligible to get a Post Graduate Diploma in these courses. The candidate will have to pay Rs 10,000 fees for it. Similarly, in undergraduate degree courses, if the candidate has completed 36 credits or 9 courses in semester pattern or 5 courses in non-semester pattern, he or she will be eligible to get undergraduate diploma certificate on payment of Rs 5000.
“We need to collect the fees because we will have to invest a lot of time and resources in verifying the claims of the candidate,” said Duraisamy.
On average, around 30,000 students annually enroll for the 97 different distance education courses offered by Madras University. Of which, at least 25-30 per cent students are unable to complete their course for a variety of reasons.