Anna University begins ranking semester results

The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News: "Students preparing to enter engineering education programmes in different colleges in the State now have a tool to help them decide on which institution to join. The tool is comes in the form of the I, III, V and VII semester examination results statistics released by Anna University for its 227 affiliated colleges.

Students or parents of an anxious youngster looking around and asking the question "which college to join" can look up the list put up on the university website (www.annuniv.edu) . It gives the list of colleges with their code numbers, the number of students who appeared in the semester and the number passed from each college.

The final column gives the pass percentage for each college. The first 25 colleges in the list, including five government or government-aided institutions have a pass percentage of 70 and above. The next set of 26 colleges all have a pass percentage of 60 and above.

However, the colleges in question say that while in some institutions, the pass percentage may be high, the number of students who appeared should also be taken into consideration. For example, Kongu Engineering College has a pass percentage of 81.87, ranked number 4 in the list.

From that college 2,626 students appeared, of whom 2,150 passed which is This number of passed candidates is much more than the three colleges coming above. This is the case with several other colleges with large intake. The colleges say this should have been taken into consideration.

The issue of the University making the results public on the web site has been a subject of intense debate, spawned mainly by institutions in the lower end of the list. They say it adversely affects their image, especially when they are just weeks away from admission procedures. E. Balagurusamy, Vice-Chancellor and other University officials say that they have merely taken the statistics and put them on the Net.

"The facts have been displayed on the web site. Students or parents can decide on how to interpret the statistics," he says. "