DU's new tie-breaker for undergraduate admissions: Tripping on reform

Indian Express

2 days ago

When Delhi University (DU) adopted the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate admissions in 2022, it was seen as a long overdue step toward standardisation of a sprawling ecosystem. An improvement over the Central Universities Common Entrance Test introduced in 2010 for a handful of central universities, CUET promised to level the playing field by replacing the uneven Class XII cut-off system with a single, uniform test. It was an opportunity to move beyond the disparities of state boards, streamline admissions, and focus solely on merit. Though premised on fairness, some of the changes to the admission process this year — especially the addition of Class X scores as the penultimate tie-breaker, supplanting alphabetical order of candidates — tread a delicate line. In a country where access to higher education remains intensely competitive and deeply consequential, they risk reintroducing anxieties that CUET was designed to eliminate.
With 71,624 seats across 79 undergraduate programmes in 69 colleges up for applications this academic year, the new tie-breaker has been designed to offer, as DU's dean of admissions has put it, a 'more rational and merit-based approach' to break CUET deadlocks. Class X performance is a reliable indicator of consistency, arguably less vulnerable to coaching-driven score inflation. It also reduces the arbitrariness of alphabetical tie-breakers, which, though neutral, fail to reward academic effort. However, it risks undermining CUET's foundational principle, rooted in the spirit of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which advocates for equity and inclusivity in higher education. In decoupling undergraduate admission from board variability, CUET sought to ensure that scores alone did not dictate a student's future. Reintroducing board scores from Class X opens up old vulnerabilities. State board curricula and grading systems continue to vary widely in difficulty and leniency. As a result, students from better-resourced boards or urban backgrounds may gain an unintended advantage. Moreover, NEP 2020 encourages holistic assessments over rigid reliance on any single score. Shifting the focus to grades — especially one from years prior — might be counterproductive for students who have matured academically in the years since or had faced personal setbacks at that stage.
Instead of tying the admission process up with three separate academic records — CUET, Class XII, and Class X — a possible alternative could have been the option of more granular tie-breakers within CUET itself; its scores could have been extended to more decimal places or to domain-specific section scores. As India reimagines its higher education architecture, policymakers must be careful that efforts to fix procedural gaps do not reignite old apprehensions or come at the cost of inclusivity.