By Express News Service CHENNAI: Think twice before you key in your list of preferred colleges in the TN Engineering Admissions (TNEA) online counselling 2019 as many students have missed out on better seats owing to ignorance of how the process works.a There are two major reasons why students lose better seats, said TNEA-2019 secretary T Purushothaman. Many fail to opt for seats in the Open Category (OC), thinking that they are reserved for forward communities. “In fact, top rankers are anyway allotted seats in the OC. However, students, who have scored mid-level ranks in the first round, directly opt for seats in their community only, therefore losing the seats available through OC,” he said, adding that TNEA has an option through which students can check the number of available seats in respective communities. Another problem is that students fail to take the order of preference seriously. A candidate, who scored a rank under 1,200, had assumed that she would not get a seat in the College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University and earmarked a reputed private college as her top preference. However, she had listed courses from CEG as second and third choices. “I got the seat in the private engineering college only to learn that a friend of mine, who had scored slightly lesser than me, had got the seat in the CEG. That’s when I learned that he had listed it as his top preference and got the seat through upward mobility,” the candidate said. Students, who have been allotted a seat, can opt for upward mobility so that if a vacancy arises in one of their higher preferences, they can fill in that seat. However, since many of them put better colleges below and list a college where they will definitely get a seat as their top preference, they miss out on better seats, said Purushothaman. “A top candidate had listed only three choices. Had the boy put out more choices, he would have definitely got the seat. But he had to be pushed to the second round inevitably because he did not get the three seats he had listed,” he said, adding that a student can fill in as many choices as they want in their preferred order.

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