The fairly large number of students who have secured full A+ this year may exacerbate the Plus One admission crisis.
This year, 68,604 students secured A+ grade in all subjects, 24,241 more than last year. Of the 68,604, 24,422 were able to get full A+ courtesy of grace marks awarded to them.
The crisis caused by 1.25 lakh students in the State securing full A+ two years ago is still fresh in everyone’s memory. Then, many students will full A+ found themselves without any allotment or unable to get schools or subject combinations of their choice. In a school in the district, nearly 30 students had the same grade point then.
Though the full A+ students this year do not number as much as that two years ago, it is still considerably higher than the 44,363 last year. The possibility of a repeat of 2021, albeit on a smaller scale, cannot be ruled out, especially at the taluk level. Where specific schools are in great demand, the full A+ students may not get admission there, though they may get the same subject combination in another school.
The migration of students from other education boards too increases demand for Plus One seats. Last year, nearly 38,000 students from other boards took Plus One admission. These include 29,000 from CBSE alone. The announcement of CBSE results slightly earlier this year and resumption of classes gives reason to hope that the numbers of students shifting to the State board may see a dip this time.
The government also has the problem of unaided batches in aided schools on its hands. Ninety such batches had been sanctioned across the State long back. The V. Karthikeyan Nair-led committee set up by the government to study batch reorganisation had recommended that such batches be discontinued.
However, full admission is made to a handful of these unaided batches. And like the 105 uneconomic batches with less than 25 students in government and aided schools, there are 30 unaided batches without the minimum student number in aided schools too.
There is pressure on the government to retain batches. If a decision is made to continue them like last year, then a fall in student numbers in nearby government and aided schools will happen. This has been seen in the past, especially in parts of Alappuzha district. This leads to more uneconomic batches.
Minister for General Education V. Sivankutty has been saying that there would be no shortage of seats this year. Marginal seat increase and batch shifting had addressed the problem in Malabar to a large extent last year, and it would do so now. However, the problem of regional imbalance in seats cannot be ignored.
