CHENNAI: Higher education minister K Ponmudy on Saturday announced a revised schedule for TN Engineering Admissions (TNEA) counselling. As per the new schedule, counselling for general category students will begin on September 10 and conclude on November 13.
The counselling was earlier planned to begin on August 25, but it was postponed due to the delay in the announcement of NEET results. TN government postponed the counselling to avoid wastage of seats in premier engineering colleges in TN. Every year, hundreds of students abandon their engineering seats to pursue MBBS courses after qualifying NEET. Owing to this trend, hundreds of seats remain vacant in TN’s top engineering institutes like Anna University.
On Friday, the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced that the results would be released on September 7, following which the minister released the revised counselling schedule for TNEA.As per the revised schedule, four rounds of counselling will be held till November 13. The first round, for students who secured cut-off marks from 200 to 184.5, will be held from September 10 to 15. At least 14,424 students will be called to participate in the first round. Subsequently, the remaining three rounds would be held.
As many as 1.58 lakh students will compete for 1.4 lakh engineering seats. Supplementary counselling will be held from November 15 to 17 and SCA to SC counselling will be held from November 19 to November 20, with which the counselling process will come to an end.