City Colleges to Give Weightage to Portfolios in Admissions This Year
#newspaperinlearning
26th April 2026
Today’s Times of India Chennai Edition, sports a news article featuring the new admission criteria in City Colleges for their 2026-27 admissions.
The most significant aspect of this news is the paradigm shift in traditional college admission criteria - moving from a strictly marks-based system to one that evaluates and rewards practical, demonstrable skills, based on the student’s portfolio.
Bespeaks to the fact that, for the first time, traditional Arts and Science colleges in Chennai have officially started recognising digital portfolios on platforms like GitHub (for coding and computer science applicants) and Behance (for design and visual communication applicants).
Madras Christian College (MCC) is planning to give a 10% weightage over and above the cut-off marks for students who possess such impressive portfolios.
The principal of MCC Dr. Paul Wilson has acknowledged that fact that students with high practical aptitudes (in coding or performing arts) might not always secure the highest marks in board exams. This new rule attempts to level the playing field by recognising real-world skills, leading to a holistic evaluation of the candidate during admissions.
So what, pray, is the takeaway?
Colleges are finally catching up to the realities of the modern job market. The job market has long cared more about a candidate’s GitHub repository than their GPA, industries the world over hire based on Behance or Dribbble profiles. Academia is now waking up to cater to this standard!
This signals the end of rote learning’s monopoly, wherein the student just writes down reams and reams of rote-memorised content on the answer sheets.
In short, we are rapidly moving from a
world that asks, “What do you know?” to a world that asks, “What have you done?”
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