Counselling for engg admissions begins on Thursday

CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) 2020 committee has announced that the general counselling will start online on Thursday. The process is expected to go on till October 28. While the counselling for the special reservation category is over, the process has been split into four rounds based on applicants’ ranks. The cut-off for the first round is 175, which is three marks lesser than last year and 13 from the year before. 

A total of 12,263 students are expected to participate in this round. Each student will have to follow three steps as part of the counselling process. The applicants will have to make an initial payment in the first four days of each round, following which they can fill in their list of choices in the following days and finally confirm the tentative allotment issued by TNEA in the next two days. 

The provisional allotment for each round will be published on the following day. Each round will happen for a total of nine days. The portal for making the initial payment will be opened on October 12 for the second round, October 16 for the third round and October 20 for the final round. Speaking to Express, a senior member from the committee said students should fill in as many choices as they want, to ensure that they get a seat of their preference.

He added that applicants who are allotted their first choice can either accept it or turn it down or choose to participate in the next round or withdraw from counselling. Applicants who have been allotted their subsequent choice of seats will have five options. They can accept a seat or accept the seat and opt for upward mobility in case a higher preferred choice is available. 

The third option would be to deny the seat and opt only if upward mobility through preference is available. The applicant can further turn down the seat or participate in the subsequent rounds of counselling (if any). If a student is allotted no seat of their preference, they can opt for upward mobility or choose to participate in the subsequent round or withdraw from counselling. The cut-off marks for previous years can be found on https://cutoff.tneaonline.org/.