Letter to Apeejay schools and their reposnse on selection criteria

Note: Entire conversation has been added now, last updated on January 28th, 2008

There was some confusion and doubt in parents mind related to selection list of Apeejay schools. As we could not get much details on issues reported by parents so we send a mail to school principals (Saket, Sheikh Sarai and Pitam Pura) and in response to our e-mail (Dated: January 25, 2008) that we had sent on behalf of all parents, we have received response from Mr. Aditya Berlia (head of ASERF - Apeejay Education Research Foundation) clarifying the doubts that were raised by parents through this blog.

Here is the abstract of this e-conversation:

We asked them to give clarification regarding nursery shortlisting which took place on 24th Jan 2008 across Apeejay schools in Delhi. The issues we highlighted included:
1) Since from the lists it was not clear as to what was the basis of shortlisting. So we asked them to help us understand the exact criteria that schools have followed.
2) As we all had observed that there are kids who scored higher points (for example 50, 54, 58 etc.) and they have not made it to the list but kids with less points (for example 40, 45, 50) have been selected. We asked them to give explanation of the same.

In his response (Dated: January 26, 2008) Mr Aditya mentioned that Apeejay Education Research Foundation has designed “representative affirmative action” system for the nursery admission and details can be found at research foundation website http://admissions.apeejay.edu/
Mr Aditya also mentioned that “system is new and some of the factors are hard to explain; we certainly could do a better job in this regard. I am sure however you will appreciate the manner in which we have conducted the admissions this year; we are certainly quite proud of it.”

Giving due respect to Mr. Aditya’s explanation we spent good time understanding the system process from website, and it was clear that the school had prepared 11 lists (by segments) and selected top scoring kids from each of these lists. So it is also clear that every list will have its own cutoff and hence a kid with 50 points (from “engineering segment”) might have failed but a kid with 35 points (from “media segment”) has made it to the selection list.

We don’t see any rule violation here, except that the school has not made the complete list available to public, so we have sent another mail (Dated: January 26th 2008) to Mr. Aditya asking school to publish the complete list so that we can check if this “system” has really been followed.

Updates received on January 28, 2008:
We have received response from Mr. Aditya today and in his response he mentioned that “With regards to publishing the names and numbers we had decided not to do it online to protect the privacy of the parents. Since the marks given be broken up to reveal confidential information about the parents' qualification and work background, as well as allow anyone to find out the status of someone else's admission, we wish to err on the side of caution in this regard. In this day and age when the privacy of individuals both online and offline are been regularly compromised we felt ethically obliged not to reveal this information online.”

He also added that “Next year we plan to implement a more stringent security system with a username / password aspect; along with a more secure server (better programming as pointed out by you is also needed). The lists were put on the notice board of the school for local consumption. Certainly we have learned a lot from the process this year (we received around 6700 applications for 300 seats), and try for more disclosure next year, perhaps putting in a place a system where marks are given immediately at the point of application.”

We thank Mr. Aditya for timely clarification he has provided to all of us. This has certainly helped everyone