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Time of India
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
State to use AI to detect fake applications in UG college admissions
Kolkata: The state higher education department will use an application driven by artificial intelligence (AI) in its centralised admission portal to weed out fake applications for undergraduate college admissions this year. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The system, which was test-piloted during last year's admission, will be deployed with minor modifications this year to detect fake profiles, fake images, fake identities and block them. In 2020, actress Sunny Leone's name featured in the merit list of Asutosh College — she was the highest-scoring candidate for BA (Honours) in English. Investigation revealed the application was fake, a prank that had slipped through the verification process. There have been other instances when names of celebrities, including actors and footballers Messi and Ronaldo, were detected in undergraduate college applications. The higher education department hopes the use of AI tool will help it avoid such embarrassments. "We expect the enhanced AI-driven application programme to improve the integrity and efficiency of the admission process, ensuring that only genuine applications are considered. The use of advanced technology in this manner reflects a significant step forward in combating fraudulent activities during admission," an official said. Using the latest technology, the portal will be able to identify fake candidates by sifting through ID proof, mobile numbers, names and images. Last year, there were over 50 lakh applications from around 4 lakh candidates in the first phase. Using the AI tool, multiple cases were identified where names and images did not match, and they were blocked. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The fake applications among them were identified and tracked. According to sources in Bikash Bhavan, multiple cyber cafés were identified where fake profiles were created. "The portal was able to weed out fake applications last year. The number of complaints was minimal. I am confident there will be even fewer fake profiles this year. We have the latest technology that can easily identify if a candidate is genuine or fake and block the fake profiles. We even have a mechanism that can recognise images," said an official. Several college principals acknowledged that the centralised portal had reduced the tiresome job of spotting fake applications. "Earlier, identifying fake applications was a huge challenge. Now, it is being handled efficiently by the centralised system. Inviting applications, sorting, and preparing merit lists — everything is being done by the centralised system," said New Alipore College principal Jaydeep Sarangi.
The Hindu
06-05-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
Internship for undergraduate students, mandatory under NEP, remains a challenge for West Bengal colleges
Colleges in West Bengal are struggling to meet a new requirement under the recently implemented National Education Policy (NEP), which is mandatory internship to be undertaken by all students in order to get a degree. As the policy, implemented in 2023, a student can exit college at any time — after a year, two years, or after finishing the full course — but not without doing an internship. This is turning out to be a challenge for colleges with many practical problems cropping up. 'While the NEP document makes the internship sound like an exciting world of opportunities, including interning with a farmer or a shopkeeper to get hands on training, many practical problems are raising their heads. What can be the relevant fields for a student of literature to intern in? Are they just the traditional fields such as teaching or journalism, or can content creation also become a field to intern in? Our colleges and universities do not have the resources to place all their students as interns, and some organisations are even charging money from the interns, instead of paying them,' Samata Biswas, professor of English at the Sanskrit College and University, said. Also read | Budget 2024: Internship scheme with ₹5,000 monthly allowance announced for one crore youth Some colleges are being optimistic about it. Jaydeep Sarangi, principal of Kolkata's New Alipore College, said: 'Earlier, classroom teaching was all. Now, training, certificate courses, internships and placement drives are equally important. In our college, for example, students are trained to prepare soap, phenol, sanitizer, floor cleaners, etc. as part of their internship so that they can stand on their own feet. We train students to go for start-ups as government jobs are limited.' Gour Mohan Sachin Mandal Mahavidyalaya, located in a village outside Kolkata, has tied up with a firm that will train students in IT and get them certificates from Infosys Foundation. 'Finding internship opportunities for a large number of students was a problem, particularly in a rural college like ours. Only when online internship was approved by the affiliating university (University of Calcutta, in their case), we could find a way out. We signed an MoU with an organisation for providing 80 hours of internship in blended mode in IT that will earn them certificates from Infosys Foundation. Classes have begun for the course,' said an associate professor at the college. Dr. Biswas of Sanskrit College and University added: 'The internship sounds like an exciting idea on paper, but only colleges and universities with a lot of money (essentially private ones) can implement it effectively. We haven't even begun. Because we aren't offering multiple exits, we still have a semester to get it right. We will place them with organisations that we know.'
