Lost in the seat matrix: engineering season begins in Tamil Nadu

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Tamil Nadu inducts its engineering students into Anna University and its affiliated institutions through a fully online, single-window system, which is carried out by the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) committee | Photo Credit: B. Velankanni Raj

For a student in Tamil Nadu, choosing an engineering seat comes with its own challenges. While on one side is the burden of choosing a course that would yield a job, on the other side is the challenge of navigating an online system to land the preferred seat at the preferred institution. The twain, often, does not match for many.

Tamil Nadu inducts its engineering students into Anna University, the State’s public technical university, and its affiliated institutions through a fully online, single-window system, which is carried out by the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) committee under the supervision of the Directorate of Technical Education (DoTE).

Students are to create a login for themselves on the TNEA website, fill in their details in the forms available, upload certificates, and pay the counselling fees. A merit list is released on a designated date, calculating their cut-off marks based on Higher Secondary marks using the formula Maths + (Physics+Chemistry)/2. The next step in the process is choice filling, where students are expected to fill in their choice of seat and institution. This is a critical point where many falter.

Here’s how this process works. The student fills in their choice of seats and institutions and locks it. At the time of allotment, if the seats of choice are already taken by candidates with higher ranks or cut-off marks, the student is not allotted any seat in the current round but can participate in the subsequent rounds.

Choice filling, thus, becomes a crucial component of the counselling process where dreams are often broken or made. In an event organised by The Hindu Education Plus a few months ago, T. Purushothaman, Secretary, TNEA, had made a detailed presentation on the counselling process where he underlined the importance of this stage. Students are allowed to exercise any number of choices, he had said. To emphasise his point, he had offered a snippet from the TNEA 2025 counselling process: one of the students had entered 1,502 choices!

He had urged students to fill in as many combinations as they could, depending upon their cut-off marks. The lower the marks, the more choices there should be, was his message. In 2025, a little less than 1,000 students who participated in the first round of counselling were allotted seats in the second round, said Jayaprakash Gandhi, a long-time career guidance counsellor. The figure was a little above 600 this year, showing an improvement, but the concern remains about a greater divide between the rural and urban students.

Officials of the TNEA committee, however, say that they have noticed an improvement in the choice filling pattern of students of late.