CHENNAI: Engineering counselling will take off with 31 per cent vacancy in seats this year. Higher education minister KP Anbalagan on Monday released the merit list for Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) 2020. The highest ranker secured a 199.67 cut off mark.
Coimbatore-based student Sashmitha MS has topped the list followed by R Navaneethakrishnan from Tiruvannamalai who secured the second rank with the same cut off. The second highest cut-off 199.5 was secured by R Kavya, C Aditya and Praveen Kumar. Six out of the top ten students were female while only 36.41 of the total applicants were female. The ranks were released for a total of 1,12,406 candidates, while the total number of seats available through the government quota is 1,63,154. This means that there are 31 per cent more seats submitted for the counselling than the number of candidates.
Counselling for special categories including disabled, ex-servicepersons and sports quota will be held from October 1-5 and seats will be allotted the day after. Online counselling for the general quota will be from October 8 to 27 and it will be held in four rounds. Out of the total applicants, 14 per cent were from CBSE and less than one percent were from ISC and other state boards. The rest were from Tamil Nadu state board schools. Anbalagan said that private colleges surrendered a total of 27,466 seats to TNEA for the online counselling.
The cut-off marks for the first round was 178 in 2019 and 190 in 2018. Details can be found at https://cutoff.tneaonline.org/. The normalised score for the counselling is out of 200 marks. Mathematics has a weightage of 100, physics 50 and chemistry 50. For example, a student who scores 90 in mathematics, 80 in physics and 70 in chemistry would have a normalised score of 165 (90+40+35).
This is assuming that at least one student from state board has scored centum in each subject. If not, all scores will be normalised with respect to the highest score any student has obtained in that subject. For example, if the highest score any student has gotten in
Mathematics is 90, then a student who scores 80 will have a normalised mark of 88.88 ((80/90)*100).
In the case of candidates who have qualified from National Boards namely CBSE and ISCE, the highest mark obtained in the relevant subject by the candidates at the National Level alone will be taken into consideration for normalisation. The Other Boards will be requested to furnish the maximum marks scored in the relevant subjects. In case, such marks are not available before the preparation of rank, the maximum marks scored in that Board will be considered as 100.
In case two students have the same normalised score, then the student with the higher score in mathematics was ranked higher. A second level tie breaker would be the physics score and third level will be the fourth subject (biology, computer science, etc).
If the candidates are still tied over scores, then the older student would get preference. And a tie of score beyond this would be sorted with allotment of a random number. This year a total of 791 students were ranked using the random number, Abalagan said.
The rank list was issued after a nearly 20-day wait from when it was expected. Initially, the rank list was scheduled to be released on September 7, however, the class 12 revaluation results were due on September 8. Therefore, it was postponed to September 17.