Existing college students can shift laterally to another college

 NEP2020 has a significant focus on student mobility. You can study for some time, take a break, go back to studies in a different institution and so on. The same can be done, of course, even without taking a break.

Do you feel that you are no longer happy at your current institution? If so, you may consider taking lateral admission to another institution which will be more in line with your interests and aspirations.

Lateral admission means that you will get credit for most, if not all, courses that you have already passed in your current institution. So when you think of lateral admission, you must discuss with the institution regarding their curriculum, mapping of your existing courses, how many credits will be given and so on. It should not happen that once you change your institution, you are told that you practically have to restart. So, be careful.

In this blog, I am writing about lateral admission at JK Lakshmipat University.

JKLU allows lateral admission, that is, someone who has spent a year at some other college can seek admission at JKLU in the second year and we will grant appropriate credits for the work done at the other college, and the student can graduate in 3 additional years (for a 4-year program) and 2 additional years (for a 3-year program). The process is pretty transparent.

I will take the example of B.Tech. program for explaining the process, though a similar process is available in other programs as well. A student takes admission in one college, and after a year, decides to apply to JKLU for the second year. We will expect the student to submit details of all the courses done at the other institution, including the curriculum, and also the transcript or marksheet from the university. Our faculty will review this. Some courses will be similar to the courses in our curriculum (whether we do that in our first year or second year, it does not matter). Depending on performance in that course, we may consider that course as having completed. Note that we are not looking for identical courses (because the chances are that the curriculum in two institutions will never really match 100%) but only sufficient overlap. For example, almost every college would have a programming course in the first year, and a couple of maths courses. We can consider them as equivalent to our courses. Some courses may not be in our curriculum but we may consider them as equivalent to our "Open Electives." So, after this evaluation, we will decide what courses the student still needs to do once s/he joins our program. (Even if you do not have the official transcripts, we can still plan your program, though admission will require the transcripts at a later stage.)

For example, let us assume that our program has 40 courses spread over 4 years. The student comes after having done 10 courses in the first year. It is possible that we consider only 8 of them as equivalent to our program (including open electives). So now, we will say that 32 courses are still needed to be done for graduating with our degree. Now some faculty member will prepare a plan to complete these 32 courses over the remaining 3 years keeping in mind the pre-requisites, or any other constraints of the university. Now, you follow this plan (or make changes to suit your needs), and if you keep doing well, three years later, you will get a degree from JKLU.

So the lateral admission in JKLU is a pretty simple affair. If anyone is interested in switching from their college to JKLU, our admissions team would be happy to work with you on the same.

You may contact admissions team by email: admissions@jklu.edu.in or phone: +91 8302223344 or visit our website.