
CHENNAI: With no clarity on engineering and medical admissions for the forthcoming academic session, many Class XII students from science stream have opted for the five-year Bachelor of Legislative Law (Honours), the counselling for which began on Wednesday.
Even those who had secured a cutoff score of more than 90 out of 100 chose law over other mainstream courses, for which the State government is yet to finalise the counselling dates. Though the dates are out for medical counselling, uncertainty prevails as the Centre has taken up Bills passed by the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly seeking a permanent exemption from the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).
Speaking to Express, M Ashok, deputy registrar of Tamil Dr Ambedkar Law University, which is conducting the law counselling, said, “Many from science streams (bio-maths and computer science) have chosen either BALLB or BComLLB compared to the previous years.”
Despite more interest from science students, those from commerce streams bagged most seats on day one of counselling. All three toppers in the rank list - K Vignesh from Erode, A Vineshma Gracy and Hisham - from commerce streams opted for five-year BALLB course.
Also, the Chennai-based School of Excellence in Law continued to be the top pick of the applicants among the 10 affiliated colleges.
Meanwhile, for the first time in a decade, age restrictions on applying for law courses in Tamil Nadu were removed, based on instructions from the Bar Council of India (BCI).
While 22 and 27 were the age limits for general category and reserved category (SC/ST) candidates to apply for the five-year course respectively, this year many over 30 applied for the course. However, none could make it to the top 1,000.
Law Minister C V Shanmugam inaugurated the counselling session in Chennai on Wednesday.