St Stephen’s College on Monday released its first cut-off list for the 10 undergraduate courses it offers, with highest cut-offs being announced at 98.75% for BA English (Hons) and BA Economics (Hons) for students coming from commerce background. While the cut-off for BA Economics (Hons) remains the same as last year, there is a marginal increase of 0.25 percentage points in the English cut-off. The cut-off for BSc Physics (Hons), however, saw a dip of 0.67 percentage points.

This year, the college has received 19,862 applications, with 3,505 and 3,418 students applying for English and Economics respectively, officials said.

The cut-off for BA Economics (Hons) is 98.5% for commerce students and 97.75% for students from humanities and science streams. The cut-offs saw a marginal increase for humanities and science students in most of the courses.

The cut-off for BA English (Hons) stands at 98.75% for commerce students, 98.25% for humanities students and 98.75% for science students. Compared to last year, the course saw an increase of 0.25 percentage points for students coming from commerce background and 0.75 for students from humanities and sciences backgrounds.

In Economics, the college has put a rider that applicants need to score 90 and above in mathematics to secure a seat. While those under CNID and CNI need to have 90% marks in the subject, applicants under all other categories including general, SC, ST need to score 92% marks. In English honours, applicants must score 90% in English Core or 85% in English Elective.

For the BA programme, the college increased the cut-off for humanities students by 1 percentage point, locking the number at 96.5%. Students from commerce and science streams need to score 98% to enter the programme, just like last year.

For a seat in the BA History (Hons) course, however, commerce students need to score 98.5%, students from humanities need to score 97.25% and science students need to get 98.5%. This has also seen a marginal increase from last year, when the cut-offs were locked at 98%, 96.5%, and 98% for commerce, humanities and science students, respectively.

For a seat in BSc Physics (Hons), however, the cut-offs were decreased from 97.33% last year to 96.66% this year. For BSc Chemistry (Hons), the cut-off stood at 96.33%, with an increase of .33 percentage points from last year. In BSc Mathematics (Hons), too, there has been a marginal increase of .25 percentage points for students from humanities and science backgrounds.

Anju Shrivastava, principal of Hindu College, said the cut-off released by St Stephen’s would help other colleges in assessing and deciding their cut-offs as well. Requesting anonymity, principal of another college in the north campus said other colleges are likely to have similar or higher cut-offs than Stephen’s in order to receive maximum applications and filter students accordingly.

“The cut-off is based on the number of applications we receive. It depends on the marks of the candidates who applied for the course,” Karen Gabriel, head of the English department, said when asked about the English honours cut-off. The cut-offs are decided via a standard process where the principal, head of the department, and the tutor for admission look at the number of applications and make decisions accordingly.

Starting Friday, the college will begin conducting interviews for various subjects and the list of interviewees will be released on Wednesday.

First Published: Jun 25, 2019 07:27 IST