Here's Deepa Kurup's report in The Hindu:
The Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE-2009), which is being conducted in 147 cities across the country on [8 February 2009], has 2.3 lakh candidates vying for PG seats/doctoral programmes at central institutes and other government scholarship/assistantship at engineering institutes which use GATE scores. Last year, this number was 1.7 lakh, a 27 per cent increase in the number of aspirants.
While the increase is 27% all over the country, the IISc zone witnessed a 54% increase in the number of candidates writing GATE compared to last year. IISc zone consists of Bangalore and Hyderabad. As expected, the increase in primarily in CS, EC and EE papers.
ReplyDeleteThe applicants-count for CS paper had before this fallen from ~35000 applicants in Feb-2004 to ~17000 in Feb-2007.
ReplyDeleteI can accept that the recession, layoff etc might have motivated people to write GATE. But considering that the survey does not comprehensively say how many who wrote the exams had work experience, how many were freshies and how many of them were said bye by their employers and hence wrote the exam - I do not think that people wrote GATE because of recession would be the right conclusion!!
ReplyDeleteApplications, yes. Aspirants, hardly.
ReplyDeleteDear Khalil,
ReplyDeleteThe drop in CS applicants was partly because IT was introduced as a separate paper. Now, IT has been removed and it has been merged with CS.
Giridhar
@Giri:
ReplyDeleteI think IT was a separate paper in 2004 too :)
I say all this as I gave both GATE-2004 and GATE-2007 :)
One more info: it appears, from this year onwards the GATE score is valid only for 1 year. So, the number of 3rd year B.Tech. students appearing for GATE should decrease, as whatever score they get becomes invalid by the time they complete the B.Tech. programme. In spite of this, the number of applicants has increased. So, you may be right!
ReplyDelete1 important thing.
ReplyDeletelast date for submitting the GATE application was a few days before recession started. So it is not that people filled forms because of recession. They were unaware of it then.
What has happened is that those who had filled the form casually also became serious later after the recession effects were seen. That increased the competition.