Students across India will be eligible to register for two-degree programmes at the same time, according to the latest provision offered by the University Grants Commission (UGC). Students can take up these courses in offline-online, both programmes in offline, and both degrees in online mode. This will also allow students to take admitted to more than one college at the same time. A student can study BTech at IIT Delhi and BA in its neighbouring college JNU at the same time, however, there are some considerations as well.
After M Jagdeesh Kumar announced the flexibility in a media briefing on Tuesday, UGC issued detailed guidelines on the two-degree programme today. According to the guidelines, “a student can pursue two full-time academic programmes in the physical mode provided that in such cases, class timings for one programme do not overlap with the class timings of the other programme.”
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Degree or diploma programmes under ODL/Online mode shall be pursued with only those colleges which are recognized by UGC/Statutory Council/Govt of India for running such programmes. Many colleges which are not authorised to run online courses also offer such programmes leading to confusion among students. To check the authorisation of the university and its courses lies with the students.
No retrospective benefit can be claimed by the students who have already done two academic programmes simultaneously prior to the notification of these guidelines. These guidelines will be eligible for students pursuing UG and PG courses, however, those in PhD cannot avail of the rule.
UGC has asked colleges and higher education institutes to devise mechanisms, through their statutory bodies, for allowing their students to pursue two academic programmes simultaneously and ensure it is followed without any overlap. UGC claims that with the new relaxation coming in there will not be any hard separations between arts and sciences, between curricular and extracurricular activities, vocational and academic streams, etc.
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