Sunday, September 30, 2012

Free Coaching for CSIR-UGC-NET Exam in AP University

I was very heartened to see this news report, "ANU tops in UGC-JRF-NET" in The Hindu a few days ago, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3920637.ece.

It mentions that Acharya Nagarjuna University (ANU) of Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh has topped the UGC-JRF-NET results in the country with 142 applicants clearing the Lecturer-ship level of the exam. It also mentions that 4 applicants cleared the JRF (research fellowship) level. As I understand it, those who cleared JRF level are eligible for Rs. 16,000 p.m. CSIR or UGC research fellowship for 2 years initially followed by a few additional years (max. 3) at Rs. 18,000 subject to some conditions; and are also eligible for Lecturer-ship. JRF is the higher bar; LS (Lecturer-ship) is below it.

"Acharya Nagarjuna University is situated between the cities of Vijayawada and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh on Calcutta and Chennai National Highway (NH-5).", http://www.nagarjunauniversity.ac.in/location.asp. That seems to imply that it is a tier-2 city or semi-urban university. In my humble opinion, that makes the achievement even more laudable.

The interesting point for me is that the article mentions that ANU has, with the assistance of UGC, provided free coaching classes for the NET exam since 2005. That may have been an important contributory factor for the wonderful results. Perhaps other semi-urban/rural universities could emulate ANU in this regard.

It would be interesting to know the break up of NET results streams wise. http://csirhrdg.res.in/netresultjune2012.pdf gives the results but without any break up stream wise  - I mean CS&IT, Physics, Maths, etc. http://csirhrdg.res.in/ gives general info. about the CSIR-UGC NET exam but I could not find links to streams wise break up. An interesting link is the information bulletin for the coming Dec. 2012 Joint CSIR-UGC NET exam: http://csirhrdg.res.in/ibnetdec12.pdf

I did some quick summing-up of the numbers to get a feel of how many cleared it. To facilitate the summing up I copied the data into an Excel sheet.

Note: A result row has a maximum 10 pairs of roll no.-rank entries/columns.

Quote from result pdf document "1. Junior Research Fellowship(JRF-NET):The candidates whose roll numbers are listed below have qualified in the test for JRF-NET. These candidates are also eligible for Lectureship-NET subject to eligibility criteria of UGC/Universities/ Institutes."

The number count:
(I) JRF(NET)CSIR:-
[(37 + 49 + 33)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 1 rank-columns  = 1191

(II) JRF(NET)UGC:-
[(11 + 49 + 49 + 21)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 0 rank-columns = 1300

Quote from result pdf document "2.Lectureship(NET):- The following candidates have qualified the eligibility test for Lectureship-NET. The candidates qualifying for Lectureship-NET will be eligible for recruitment as lecturer as well as for JRF-ship in a Scheme/Project, if otherwise suitable as per the eligibility criteria of that Scheme/Project. However, they will not be eligible for Regular JRF-NET Fellowship. They will be eligible to pursue Ph.D program with or without any fellowship other than JRF-NET."

The number count:

[(21 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 12)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 4 rank-columns  = 3274

To summarize: 2491 candidates passed JRF and 3274 candidates passed LS (Lecturer-ship).

So ANU's count of 4 JRF seems to indicate that it is not really in the top bracket. Therefore the article's statement that ANU "topped the country in UGC-JRF-NET" results seems to be quite a stretch :). Nonetheless 142 applicants qualifying for lecturership seems to be quite an achievement and ANU may have topped the results country-wide from this numbers-count point of view.

Another point, important from CS/IT perspective, is that I was told that, at least for CS&IT stream (Computer Science & Information Technology), this NET exam pattern has been changed to more of an objective test type recently (perhaps from last December) and so is somewhat less difficult to clear as compared to previous years.

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