Students at a practical class in a technical school. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, May 14: Private engineering schools have requested the state government to adopt an e-counselling model for admission of students into various diploma engineering colleges.

It will be similar to the pattern of Plus Two admission system implemented by the student academic management system (SAMS).

For the last three years, more than 50,000 students are appearing in the diploma entrance test.

However, only 25 to 30 per cent of them are actually taking admission, leaving more than 60 per cent of the total seats vacant.

Diploma schools have blamed lack of awareness among the high school graduates about the “complex e-counselling process” and ignorance of the Internet technology for the vacant seats.

They have also blamed the process in which the candidate is forced to come to the nodal centres spending a lot of money.

The promoters of various engineering schools have urged the government to introduce the e-counselling procedure adopted by the higher education department for Plus Two admissions as it is relatively simpler, student friendly and less time consuming.

Comparing the two procedures, the engineering school authorities opined that while the admission authorities only allot seats through the software processing as per merit leaving the process of admission, fee deposit, submission and verification of documents to respective institutions in case of student academic management system, the admission authorities at nodal centre controls the choice locking, document verification, fee deposit leading to a lot of inconvenience for students in diploma entrance test.

This has allegedly discouraged the students to take admission who are weary of such stringent procedures, they said.

This is perhaps the reason why more than two lakh students take admission in Plus Two, while only around 13,000 get into diploma engineering, said Pitambar Sethi, an engineering school owner.

While requesting for the Plus Two model e-counselling from this academic year, the institutions, in a letter to the department of technical education, have mentioned that the diploma engineering courses have already been declared equivalent to Plus Two courses in November 2013.

This year, the diploma entrance test is scheduled to be held on May 18.