Commonwealth scholarship
Commonwealth Scholarship is perhaps now the only important and prestigious scholarship available to our young scholars. It is therefore expected that great care would be taken in awarding this scholarship. It seems regrettable that the UGC this year has suddenly changed the prevailing rules of selecting the awardees from among the applicants, apparently ignoring the fact that there still exists two different systems of examination in the older public universities and there are significant differences between them.
One is based on the numerical marks where 60% is considered to be first division/class which is rather difficult to obtain, especially in non-science subjects; the other one is the letter grade system convertible to grade points and in this system to obtain high marks is comparatively easy.
Furthermore, in the numerical system second division/class bandwidth is very wide stretching from 45 to 59%, one who obtains 45% marks along with the one who obtains 59% belong to the same bandwidth, although between the latter and the one who belongs to the next higher band obtaining 60% marks there is hardly any qualitative difference. In the grading system, the bandwidths between the grades are much narrower and as such, anomaly does not exist.
The UGC had not mentioned the change of rules in its advertisement. The UGC seems to have not attempted to synchronize the two systems resulting in the automatic exclusion of the students coming from the numerical system. The new system introduced by the UGC strongly favours the newer public universities and the private universities.
Moreover, it appears that the UGC considered a first division in SSC/HSC to be equivalent to a first class in Honours /Masters, which does not seem to be right either. It is not fair to summarily dismiss/reject the application of a candidate simply because he/she has a second division in SSC/HSC. There are subjects like philosophy, English etc. where to obtain a first class in Honours /Masters is really difficult.
We would like to draw the attention of the authorities concerned to look into the facts stated above and take necessary steps to rectify these.
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