DU Admissions 2014: Decoding 100% cut-off – hoax or truth?

The media is full of news pieces stating that the inevitable has happened! Yes, Delhi University (DU) cut-offs have, believe it or not, soared up to 100%. If reports are to be believed students seeking admissions in the BSc Computer Science course have to meet a 100% cut-off if they wish to secure a seat in any of these three DU colleges – Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee or Acharya Narendra Dev.

Quite shocked, we got to thinking whether this is even possible. We agree that students can achieve a 100% in their best of four score (BFS) with the percentages shooting sky high in class 12 but then is it a sane thing to do to keep cut-offs at a cent percent.

To understand this, we got talking to a few DU professors so that they could help us demystify the 100% cut-off.

Vinita Chandra, English (honours) professor at Ramjas College revealed that, “There is usually an additional eligibility criteria (for admissions). College cut-offs will usually not say 100 but rather would say 97-100 or 95-100. It is never a single 100”. She further went on to elaborate that, “Few days ago we were told that there would be one cut-off and we couldn’t have differential cut-offs for different streams and no additional criteria. But due to that thing over turning what we can do now is have different cut-offs for arts, science and commerce. For instance in English in Ramjas, what we have is that 91.5 is the cut-off for humanities students who want to study English and 93.5 is the cut-off for science students who want to do English and 97.5 is the cut-off for commerce students. So, it is probably the same thing across other courses as well”.

Parul Gaur, History (honours) professor at Maitreyi College confirmed the same saying that the cut-off percentages vary from stream to stream. She elaborated by saying, “If a student who has pursued arts in class 12 applies for an arts stream course then he/she would be given preference in DU, as in, the cut-offs for them would be lower. I will explain this to you with an example, say a student has studied arts in class 12, then for such a person the cut-off for BA (hons) History at Maitreyi is 80% with an additional criterion of having scored at least 75% in History. But for the same course if a student who is from the science or commerce stream applies then their cut-off would be 85%”. She further explained that, “High cut-offs are basically set to ensure that students who have a keen interest in the subject apply for it. Colleges do not want students to apply for any and every course just to get through to any college at DU”.

Chandra also spoke about why the cut-offs are different for different streams. She said, “If you want to do Economics (hons), the cut-off has to be differential. So, if your cut-off is already 97.5 for Eco (hons) in SRCC, so here 97.5 would be for arts/humanities and it would be more for commerce students”. She also revealed that the cut-offs are the highest for commerce students for most courses and this is primarily because “commerce students score a lot more than humanities students”.

However, she also elaborated on other reasons that go behind setting high cut-offs for commerce students by taking the English course as an example. She explained, “Almost all students who take commerce in school, want to pursue the subject in college as well. So, if we keep the cut-off a little lower, then we get flooded with applications from commerce students who are not getting commerce (hons) and if we take all those students then we don’t have any space left for humanities students who actually want to study literature”.

DU professors helped us understand that the 100% cut-off in BSc Computer Science is not for PCM students but for students applying for the course from other streams. The cut-off for this subject for PCM students at Acharya Narendra Dev is 95%, at Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm is 98% and is 97% at Shyama Prasad Mukherjee.

DU declared its first cut-off list for arts, commerce and science courses on July 1, 2014 and students can apply for admissions under this list latest by July 3, 2014. The University will be declaring the second cut-off list to fill vacant seats on July 4, 2014.