Amaravati, Aug 9 (IANS): Regular physical classes for intermediate second year students in Andhra Pradesh will begin from August 16, said an official on Monday.
"The physical classes for second year intermediate students for the academic year 2021-22 will be commencing from Monday, August 16," said Board of Intermediate Education (BIE) secretary V. Ramakrishna.
He said the board took this decision following an approval from Education Minister Audimulapu Suresh.
Prior to physical classes, the current academic year for the senior intermediate students began in virtual format on July 12, nearly a month ago.
Meanwhile, the secretary ordered all intermediate college principals to make the necessary arrangements for conducting physical classes from next Monday following the standard operating procedures and Coronavirus protocols.
The southern state is still logging up to 2,000 Coronavirus infections on an average per day.
Unlike first year students, second year students need not go through the mandatory online admission procedure introduced in the current academic year as they just were admitted last year and get promoted to the second year automatically.
Recently, Ramakrishna ordered all the junior colleges which illegally collected fees for unapproved offline admissions for the academic year 2021-22 to return the money to the students.
Scores of corporate colleges illegally admitted first year students and even went ahead to conduct online classes without the permission of the board.
Not only admitting, they even started demanding more fees from students and threatened some students that they will not be included in the online classes for want of fees.
"The board is introducing online admissions from the academic year 2021-22. It is known that some of the students have already taken admissions into some colleges and also paid the college fee even before the release of notification for online admission process," he noted.
Ramakrishna made it clear that the board is not responsible for the students who have already taken these illegal admissions and paid the college fee.
He ordered the RIOs across the state to identify the erring colleges, illegally admitting first year students and warned of necessary action, including disaffiliation.
Aiming at wiping out decades-long widespread abuse and indiscriminate commercialisation of intermediate education in the state, the board introduced only online admissions from this academic year.