Deduct 6 marks of 2021 K-CET repeaters, raise IT seats by 10%: panel

The government has filed a memo in the high court, containing the proceedings of an expert committee constituted to find a solution to the issue of 24,000 repeaters from the 2021 K-CET batch.

The government constituted the five-member committee after the last hearing, seeking a methodology to bring parity in the marks awarded to repeater students and those from the 2022 batch.

The committee, headed by B Thimme Gowda, vice-chairman of the Karnataka State Education Council, has adopted the Root Mean Square (RMS) method for the purpose.

It has proposed a normalisation procedure to deduct an average of six marks in physics, chemistry and mathematics subjects from the 2021 CET repeater students' scores.

It also suggested increasing seats in IT-related branches by about 10% to bring a further level playing field.

A division bench headed by acting Chief Justice Alok Aradhe adjourned the hearing till Friday on the writ appeals filed by the government and the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) to consider the response of the repeater students.

On September 3, a single bench of the high court directed the authorities to redo the CET rankings for admission to undergraduate courses in engineering and technology for the academic year 2022-23 by considering both PU and CET marks in a 50:50 ratio. The government and the KEA filed appeals challenging this order.

The committee adopted the RMS method because marks awarded in all subjects during Covid-19 were relatively higher than those given in the exam held after the pandemic.

The method entails subtracting the difference in RMS scores of Covid-time data and post-Covid data from the Covid-19 data set.

The average marks in physics, chemistry and mathematics (PCM) subjects awarded to students of the 2021 batch were 84.04, 83.20 and 83.26, respectively. In the 2022 batch, the average scores in PCM subjects were 77.77, 78.16 and 76.19, respectively. After applying the method, the committee suggested that the qualifying marks for the 2021 batch be deducted by an average of six in physics, five in chemistry and seven in mathematics. This would result in a total deduction of six marks for 100 qualifying marks.

The committee, however, stated that even after normalisation, the ranking of the Covid-19 batch may affect that of the 2022 batch.

"Therefore, to safeguard the interest of post-Covid batch students also, seats in IT-related branches in colleges as per previous years' preferred selection of seats may be increased by about 10%," the committee suggested.