Student politics has forced Calcutta University to contemplate scrapping its plan to introduce entrance tests for postgraduate courses barely two months before the start of the admission season.

“Entrance tests would be a suitable admission procedure to ensure that students of autonomous colleges are treated on a par with those from CU-affiliated colleges. But now that we find a section of students opposed to such tests, we need to explore other options. It is not going to be an easy task finding an alternative, though,” vice-chancellor Suranjan Das said on Thursday.

The “section of students” responsible for this last-minute departure from a carefully considered — and universally accepted — admission system had resorted to a daylong agitation last Tuesday under the banner of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI).

The unrest on the College Street campus immediately brought the CU Syndicate to the table to plot possible alternatives, one of which is to revert to the old system of admission on the basis of scores for students of “home” colleges and through a statistical procedure called “normalisation” for those from other institutions.

The university had decided to introduce entrance tests in all subjects based on a high court ruling in a case filed by some students of St Xavier's College, alleging discrimination in admissions against candidates from “non-CU backgrounds”. The court had asked the authorities to treat students from St Xavier’s — an autonomous institution since 2006 — and all other colleges outside the university’s jurisdiction on a par with those from its affiliates.

So won’t going back to the old system amount to contempt of court?

“The court order does not say that entrance tests are the only solution to establish parity between the results of students of St Xavier’s College and those of CU-affiliated colleges. We will not allow the university to hold entrance tests under any circumstance,” said a leader of the SFI.

He insisted that the old system of reserving 95 per cent of the seats in all postgraduate courses for graduates from affiliated colleges and the remaining five per cent for students from non-CU colleges was a fair one.

Although no decision has been taken yet, it is almost certain that postgraduate admissions this year won’t be on the basis of entrance tests. “Now the challenge for us is to find an alternative which meets the court-specified requirements as well as the students’ demand,” said an official.

Apart from introducing entrance tests, the CU Syndicate had planned to raise the bar for postgraduate admissions this year by introducing higher cut-off marks. “The idea is to keep the number of applicants at a manageable level,” vice-chancellor Das had said.

An aggregate of 40 per cent in honours is currently the minimum a student must get to be eligible for admission to a postgraduate course.