Extended counselling won't benefit students already enrolled

The extended round of counselling may come as a disappointment to students who have already enrolled into colleges based on the seats allotted to them in the previous rounds.

For, nearly 500 medical seats are expected to be added for the extended round and the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) officials have made it clear that students who have already taken seats and registered with the colleges based on the allotment cannot participate in the extended round. 

The medical seats that will be added into the matrix for the extended round are from prestigious colleges. Hence, it is likely that lower rank students who have not yet gotten a seat will get an opportunity to enrol into these colleges as opposed to better ranking students who settled for whichever seat they got in the previous rounds. 

Meanwhile, the extended round of counselling is supposed to begin on July 17 and the KEA officials have not yet got clarity on the exact number of seats. The medical seats that will be added are from both the ESI Colleges (Bangalore and Gulbarga), in addition to seats in some private medical colleges. In addition, 100 seats in Bangalore Medical College, for which the Medical Council of India recently gave its approval, will be added to the seat matrix. 

KEA Director Rame Gowda said: “If the student has already reported to the college he will have to stick with it. On the other hand, if they were allotted seats earlier but did not report to colleges and chose to attend the extended round, then they will benefit from this round.” They could not wait till all the seats were added to start the
 counselling as they could not afford to gamble with the students’ career, he added.

 “The government was not sure whether it would get these seats or not. How could we bank on it and stall the counselling? We cannot gamble with their career. That is why the government had to go ahead with the counselling with the seats available at that point in time.” 

Engineering students

In engineering too, some students stand to gain and the others will have to stick with the colleges they have enrolled to. Those who have not yet reported to colleges and are choosing to participate in the extended round will get to choose from some additional seats. This includes 240 seats in Reva University, 120 in MS Ramaiah University, 17 in SJB school of Architecture, 189 in SCT Institute of Technology.

Also, since the extended round has been scheduled after the NIT and the IIT counselling, seats of those students who had earlier chosen through KEA and now have secured an NIT or IIT seat will also come back to the seat pool.