Admission Criteria in Pakistani Universities: A Case Study

Since the performance of educational institutions depends critically on their students, it is imperative that educational institutions deploy an efficient and reliable admission criteria. In the context of Pakistan, a variety of admission criteria has been developed-mostly in isolation-by different universities. Despite the importance of these admission criteria, limited systematic information exists on the relative efficacy of these different criteria, and it appears that the criteria are being developed and deployed on an intuitive hit-and-trial basis. In this paper, we endeavor to systematically study the efficacy of different admission criteria being adopted by the universities in Pakistan by focusing on a case study of the Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore. In particular, we evaluate the academic performance of the ITU students who got admission in the bachelor's degree program in ITU's Computer Science department. The results showed a significant relationship between some attributes or factors considered in the admission criteria and the academic performance of the students. The most significant factors in predicting student's performance were found to be the Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) performance and the entry test performance. This study concludes that the performance of the student in entry test and HSSC should be considered and assigned significant weightage while developing the admission criteria for the University.