LAHORE: Out of 716 public colleges, 323 colleges across Punjab have received 63,139 applications since the launch of admission cycle 2017 on July 27.
Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) developed the Online College Admissions System (OCAS) for Higher Education Department (HED) of Punjab, for processing intermediate admissions applications for their FA, FSC, ICS programs.
PITB Officials told that OCAS has processed almost one million applications during the past few years. For the 2017 cycle, 63,139 online admission applications were submitted, with 31294 applications being submitted online while 31,845 were uploaded in the system by the respective colleges.
PITB chairman and Advisor to the CM Punjab, Dr Umar Saif, said that the initiative has enhanced efficiency, ensured transparency, eliminated the hazard of long queues and saved the precious time of the youth by facilitating them to search online their college of choice and apply from home.
Free of cost availability of college brochures and online admission forms was an added feature of the system, he added.
Dr Saif further said that the system has considerably reduced the number of physical visits of students and their parents to colleges, ensured the timely compilation of applications and merit list preparation by pushing the labor-intensive and error-prone, back-office data entry activities to the end-users themselves.
It was observed that till date, applications with gender and program segregation recorded 16,756 applications for ICS (66 percent male, 34 percent female), 13,392 for Fsc Pre-Medical (69 % female, 31 % male), 12,444 for FA (65 percent female, 35 percent male), 11,882 for Fsc Pre-Engineering (76 % male, 24 % female), 7,667 for I-Com (67 % male, 33 % female), 608 for D Com (96 % male, 4 % female) and 544 for General Science (81 % male, 19 % female). All branches of Bank of Punjab across the Punjab province are accepting the challan forms for OCAS.
OCAS is built to provide easy, convenient, efficient and reliable access to students for admissions in the government colleges for higher education. The solution is based upon a collaborative relationship between Higher Education Department, Nine Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) of Punjab, Bank of Punjab and Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB).