KATHMANDU, Aug 30: “Sir, after my son passed the scholarship exam, we distributed sweets. But he could not get admission in the college for studies,” parent Hari Krishna Subedi was complaining to Sitaram Koirala, the head of the Education Department of Kathmandu Metropolitan City on Tuesday morning, “But when he tried to enroll, his online form was not shown, what happened sir?” On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Education Department was crowded with parents and students. Despite passing the scholarship exam, due to the lack of technical information about document uploading and lack of sufficient information about college matching, many students have lost their scholarships even after passing the scholarship exam.
Eliminating the curiosity of parent Hari Krishna, Head of Education Department Sitaram Koirala said, “The software of the city did not recognize your son Pragyan Subedi, so his scholarship was wasted. The software did not recognize the document uploaded by Pragyan as it was inaccurate.”
Pragyan Subedi did not get the scholarship because he did not know how to match the college of his choice and upload other documents online correctly at the time of taking the exam for studying science.
Not only Pragyan but 2,045 students like him have passed the entrance exam for scholarships conducted by the metropolis but have lost their scholarships. For the first time, KMC started the online process of recommending the school by taking an examination to systematically provide scholarships to poor and needy students within the 10 percent scholarship quota that private schools have been providing since the current academic session. But Moti Bhattarai, the officer in-charge of public schools of education department of KMC, said that there was a little confusion about the scholarship this time because even the metropolis could not provide enough information and the students were not used to information technology.
According to Koirala, students are wasting their scholarships because they do not know how to upload documents in the department, do not know how to choose priorities for college matching, are not used to online and do not know how to open websites.
The metropolis conducted scholarship exams for education, science, management, humanities, law, and technical subjects. A total of 6,017 candidates participated for 4,345 seats. Among them, 4,551 passed the full scholarship exam. But currently 16 seats are vacant in the education group, 292 in science, 1762 in management, 77 in law and 98 in humanities. "On the one hand, the metropolis did the job of conducting examinations, publishing results and college matching to make the scholarships provided by private schools transparent and systematic," said Department Head Koirala, "On the other, the scholarships still did not reach the target group. After 50 percent of the seats were vacant, the metropolis fixed the last date for applying again for the third round of admissions till 29th and 30th of August. But ironically, the students left the scholarship when they did not get the college of their choice.”
Not only this, but students recommended by the metropolis are ineligible, and the scholarships have been wasted, said Herambaraj Kandel, principal of Vishwa Niketan Secondary School in Tripureshwor. “On KMC’s recommendation, 11 students were recommended for electronic engineering in class 11 in our school. But nine were disqualified. To study technical subjects from class 9 to 12, students should have studied technical subjects in class 9 and 10,” Principal Kandel said, “They qualified. The remaining nine students were happy to pass the exam but were not eligible for study.”