The national schools debate programmes, Debating Matters India, for students of Class XI and Class XII from across the country will be organized by the British Council. The contest will begin with an Online Elimination Test (OET) which will be conducted between July 26 and August 20, 2011. Each School can register only one debate team with a minimum of four students or a maximum of six students, along with a debate co-coordinator teacher. The registration process will begin on 26th July 2011.

After registering online, the debate team will download a topic guide from which they can prepare for the OET. Upon completion of the test, 12 schools will be short listed to participate in the regional finals. Live debates will then be held with the regional finalists in the eight cities of Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Guwahati adn Kolkata.

Eight teams from the regional finals will secure a place in the national finals to be held in New Delhi between 17-19 November 2011. Debating Matters is a debate competition program intended for high school students in India. A British schools’ debate programme, originally pioneered by the Institute of Ideas (IOI), UK and running successfully for the last seven years there and also received by the Indian schools from 2008. More details can be obtained from http://www.britishcouncil.org/india-projects-debatingmatters-home.htm. The winners of the past Debating Matters competitions are Delhi Public School Megacity, Kolkata and DAV Sector – 15, Chandigarh.

Important Rounds and Dates:

1) Online Elimination Test (OET): 26 July – 20 August 2011
2) Regional Finals:
New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata: 27 September 2011
Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Bangalore: 29 September 2011
Guwahati: 30 September 2011
3) National Finals at New Delhi: 17 – 19 November 2011.

Anna University of Technology (AUT), Chennai (Tamil Nadu) has ranked self-financing / private / unaided engineering colleges in the state of Tamil Nadu. The AUT, Chennai branch has released list of it’s affiliated engineering colleges with rankings based on academic performance of first-year students in the academic year 2010-11. Though the rankings can not be taken for granted as it is, these will help the aspiring engineering students to select the best colleges. The AUT has ranked RMD Engineering College at number one position. AUT, Tamil Nadu has branches at Chennai, Coimbatore, Tiruchi and Tirunelveli. But only AUT-Chennai has put out the list of college rankings so far.

The honorable Madras high court had directed the Anna University of Technology to rank it’s affiliated colleges by 26th July 2011. The court order was given on a petition asking for the rankings, which would help engineering aspirants in Tamil Nadu to choose a good college through the single window counseling system. The AUT conducts admissions to graduate engineering courses through TANCET ranks. Other AUT branches, Tiruchi, Coimbatore and Tirunelveli also will release rankings of the engineering colleges under their affiliation soon.

The CUT, Chennai has announced rankings lists of engineering colleges based on pass percentage of students in colleges taking into account number of students who appeared for the exam as well as pass percentage. Number of answer scripts evaluated has also been taken into consideration while evaluating pass percentage. Let us hope these rankings will help the engineering aspirants and future engineering candidates to select their probable college.