CUET: St Stephen’s sticks to its guns, gives 15% weightage to interview

NEW DELHI: Even as the matter of the admission policy adopted by St Stephen's College against the backdrop of Delhi University accepting the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) as the qualifying exam, the minority college has released its admission prospectus which notifies that for all condition, 85% weightage would be given to the central admission test scores and 15% to an interview. DU vice-chancellor Yogesh Singh expressed shock at this and claimed St Stephen’s hadn’t communicated this to the university after the last letter exchanged on the subject.
DU said that the college could conduct interviews to admit the 50% of aspirants seeking admission under the reserved category, but the rest could be admitted only on their CUET scores. Being a religious minority college, 50% of the seats are reserved for Christian candidates.

The college prospectus, on the other hand, says, “Stephen's will adopt CUET as its eligibility criteria, with 85% weightage for CUET and the college's interview for shortlisted candidates with the weightage of 15%.” The college says even for sports admission, the basis of admission will be trials, certificates, CUET scores and the interview.
On May 10, DU wrote to St Stephen’s instructing it to follow the admission norms approved by university’s statutory bodies, with the CUET score being the sole criterion for all general category candidates. There was no response from the college, claims DU.
Speaking to TOI, the VC exclaimed, “I am really surprised. How could they do this? When there was no response to our last letter to them, we thought the college had decided to follow the university rules. Now, I have to examine the matter and decide.”
The college interview will be held in physical mode and there will be three components to it: academic, co-curricular, general awareness and sense of values. Under general awareness and sense of values, the candidates will be examined on their “personal outlook, sense of values, level of awareness and motivation”. On the academic side, the subject-specific requirements for admission will be provided later.
Details of the 10 programmes offered by the college are yet to be provided. The prospectus states, “As the University of Delhi is currently reviewing the programme content under the Undergraduate Curriculum Framework, details of the programme will be provided as and when cleared by the academic council of the university.”
The forms for admission to the college will be made available from the third week of June. The CUET application form number is a necessity as are the registration number on the DU admission portal and university form number.