Two days before second pre-university examinations are scheduled to begin on March 1, staff of several colleges were running from pillar to post on Wednesday trying to rectify errors they had made so that their students could get their hall tickets.

This comes in the backdrop of the Department of Pre-University Education (DPUE) deciding to pull up colleges for negligence by withholding hall tickets of their students. Colleges were pulled up for failing to register some of their candidates for the examination or entering the wrong subject or languages.

At a media conference, P.C. Jaffer, director of the department, said, “In some other instances, college principals said that they did not have Hindi as a language in colleges even though the college staff had erroneously entered that it was one of the options.”

In a last minute scramble, colleges approached the board to correct or register details of around 2,000 students.

Mr. Jaffer said that many of the colleges were so negligent that they had ‘forgotten’ to register their students for the examination. Some of the errors in data entered by the colleges were errors in the subject, addition of subjects, language chosen and the medium of instruction.

Department officials said they have taken a lenient view of this and are allowing students to appear for the examination so that their academic year is not jeopardised.

S.R. Umashanakar, Principal Secretary of the Department of Primary and Secondary Education, said that the director himself had visited some colleges to examine the issue. The admission tickets for candidates who were affected by this negligence were generated after an investigation by the department authorities.

Mr. Umashanakar said that the colleges had not entered correct details despite being issued notices by the department officials.