TISS National Entrance Test(TISSNET)

About the exam

About TISSNET

The Tata Institute of Social Sciences stopped running its own national entrance test after February 2023. Two public notices signed by the institute's Officiating Registrar moved admission for its postgraduate programmes onto the Common University Entrance Test, and the institute's notification archive carries no TISSNET announcement after that cycle. While it ran, TISSNET was worth half of a TISS admission on its own, and the marks it fed are still the last cut-offs TISS published for an intake it gated.

TISSNET never decided an admission by itself. TISS ran a two-stage selection in which the test was Stage 1, described in the institute's own table as a centre based objective type test marked out of 100 and carrying 50 per cent of the final score; Stage 2 was an Online Assessment, split between an extempore reflection worth 20 per cent and an online personal interview worth 30 per cent, per TISS's published weightage for the final selection process. A strong test score opened the door to the second stage and nothing more.

What ended it was not a TISS decision taken in isolation. The public notice dated 14 November 2023 opens by recording that the Ministry of Education and the University Grants Commission had mandated the National Testing Agency to conduct CUET for admission to postgraduate programmes across central, state and other participating universities, and that the CUET (PG) offers a single-window route into central universities and other participating organisations, deemed to be universities among them. In compliance with that, the notice states, TISS decided that admission to all its postgraduate programmes for the 2024-25 academic session would be based on CUET (PG)-2024 scores, with two management programmes carved out to consider CAT scores instead.

The carve-out did not survive the week. TISS amended the notice in a second public notice its archive dates 17 November 2023, and the amendment brought the Master of Arts in Human Resources Management and Labour Relations and the Master of Arts in Organisation Development, Change and Leadership back inside the CUET route, so that every master's degree at TISS ran on the same national score. TISS published that amendment as a scanned notice image rather than as text, with the notice it amended reproduced underneath it.

Nothing replaced TISSNET as a TISS-conducted national test. The admissions notification archive runs continuously from that November forward, and the next cycle opens with CUET registration notices rather than a test of the institute's own. TISS does still conduct an online proctored test of its own, but only against seats left vacant after the national route has run, and it is not TISSNET under another name.

At a glance

TISSNET highlights

Calendar

Important dates

TISSNET's last cycle is documented in the institute's own notices rather than in a single calendar, because TISS published each stage as it arrived.

Read down that column and the shape of the thing is clear: roughly a month from application to test, another month from test to result, and then a gap of nearly two months before the merit list, because the interview stage sat in between. The last entry closed the sequence for good.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The category structure TISSNET applicants were sorted into is the part of the eligibility picture TISS still publishes. Its reservation policy page sets out the policy for the 2023-24 academic year, the last intake TISSNET gated, as scheduled castes 15 per cent of total seats, scheduled tribes 7.5 per cent, and other backward classes in the non-creamy layer 27 per cent, with reserved seats interchangeable between SC and ST where eligible candidates are not available and unfilled OBC seats converting to general category. Economically weaker sections carry a further reservation of up to 10 per cent, and the same page fixes the income bar for it at a gross annual family income below Rs 8.00 lakh, with separate asset exclusions for agricultural land, a residential flat and residential plots.

Those are not the only categories the exam recognised. The merit-list cut-off table TISS published for the 2023-24 intake carries a column each for general, EWS, OBC, SC, ST, armed forces, Kashmiri migrant and persons with disability, so a programme's bar was struck category by category rather than once. The Guwahati campus table is laid out differently again, adding a column for each of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura beside the general and reserved-category ones, because TISS Guwahati allots a specific quota to each of those states and governs each quota by that state's own reservation policy, per the reservation policy page.

What TISS no longer publishes is the degree-level bar that a TISSNET applicant had to clear. The eligibility documents on its live admissions site are written for the routes that replaced the test, and none of the surviving TISSNET-era notices states the qualification requirement.

Step by step

Application process and fee

TISSNET applications ran on a portal TISS operated itself. The institute's notice extending the last date points candidates to appln.tiss.edu and tells them to apply through the official website only. That host no longer serves an application form, and TISS admissions now run from a different domain entirely.

The window moved twice in the final cycle. The last date to apply was extended to 28 January 2023, and then new registration and completion by already registered candidates were both pushed to 1 February 2023 at 5.00 pm, with the institute stating in that notice that no further extension would be given to the PG application. The archive's next entry records the application as closed.

The application fee is the one element of the process that did not survive in TISS's own record. None of the TISSNET-era notices still published on the institute's admissions site states what a candidate paid.

Before the exam

Admit card and exam day

The hall ticket for the last cycle went up in the week before the test, and the notice that released it doubled as the exam-day instruction. TISSNET was scheduled for 25 February 2023, a Saturday, from 2.00 pm to 3.40 pm.

The same notice settled the centre question in two sentences. A centre was allotted to the nearest city the candidate had selected, subject to the availability of seats there, and a request to change it would not be accepted or entertained under any circumstances. Candidates were told to make their own arrangements to reach the centre on time. Beyond that, the surviving notices carry no list of prohibited items and no reporting time.

Structure

Exam pattern

TISS described the paper in one phrase in its weightage table: a centre based objective type test. It was marked out of 100, and those 100 marks were scaled to 50 per cent of the final selection score, per the institute's published weightage. The sections the test was built from are recorded below.

The finer detail is not in anything TISS still publishes. The notices that survive on its admissions site do not state TISSNET's question count or its marking scheme. The non-CUET test the institute runs against vacant seats does publish both, on its postgraduate admissions page, and because that paper covers similar ground the two are easily confused.

What to study

Syllabus

No syllabus document for TISSNET survives on the TISS admissions site. The subject areas the test covered are carried in the record below, and the institute has published nothing since that restates them or supersedes them.

How to prepare

Preparation and books

There is nothing to prepare for. TISSNET has not been held since its last cycle, and the sample question paper and mock test TISS still offers sit on its postgraduate admissions page under the non-CUET entrance test, not under TISSNET.

Where it is held

Exam centres

TISSNET was a centre-based test rather than a home-proctored one, which is why the hall ticket notice deals with cities at all: a candidate named a preferred city in the application, and TISS allotted the nearest centre to it where seats were available. The list of cities the institute ran centres in is not published in any of the notices that remain on its site.

That model went with the test. The online proctored test TISS conducts now needs no centre at all, and the national route that replaced TISSNET is administered by the National Testing Agency rather than by TISS.

After the exam

Answer key

TISSNET had a proper challenge window, and TISS ran it inside the application portal rather than on a public page. The provisional answer key notice states that the key was available in the online application form for candidates who had taken the test, that queries were raised through a TISS NET Answer key Challenge option in that form, and that the last date for accepting queries was 8 March 2023 at 5.00 pm.

The institute then published a final answer key on 21 March 2023 and released candidates' answer sheets on 29 March 2023, both dated in its notification archive. Neither is reachable now. The answer-sheet notice sends candidates into the online application portal to log in, and the sole link on the final-key notice points at appln.tiss.edu, the host TISS has since retired.

Scores

Result and scorecard

The result for the last cycle was announced on 23 March 2023, two days after the final answer key, according to the admissions notification archive. TISS split it in two, publishing one result for the master's programmes and a separate one for the postgraduate diploma programmes, as the result notice shows.

A TISSNET result was never a score a candidate could carry anywhere else. It admitted its holder to the second stage of a TISS selection, and its value ended there.

Scores you need

Cutoff

The numbers worth knowing are the final merit-list cut-offs, not any bar TISSNET set on its own, because the marks TISS published combined the test with the interview stage. For the 2023-24 intake across the Mumbai, Hyderabad and Tuljapur campuses, the general-category cut-off ran from 43.55 for the Masters in Disaster Informatics and Geospatial Technologies up to 76.84 for the M.A. in Public Policy and Governance at Hyderabad, per the merit-list cut-off table. That gap, inside one institute's own programme list, is the useful fact here: a mark that carried a candidate into one TISS classroom fell well short at the next one.

The management programme most people associate with the test shows how far the categories diverged.

Blank cells in those tables do not mean a low bar. TISS footnotes them as programmes and categories in which no candidate qualified at all, which is why some rows carry a mark in only one or two of those columns. The postgraduate diploma table is the starkest case, with most of its category columns empty. These are the last cut-offs TISS published for a TISSNET-gated cycle, and no later figure supersedes them, because no later cycle used the test.

Getting a seat

Counselling and seat allotment

Clearing TISSNET put a candidate into a documented second stage rather than into a seat. Shortlisted candidates first completed a Detailed Application Form, and the consequence of skipping it was spelled out: the DAF notice states that candidates who did not complete it could not see their assessment date and would not be permitted to attend.

The Online Assessment itself ran for roughly 20 to 30 minutes before a three-member panel, in two parts. A panel member set a topic relevant to the programme and the candidate reflected on it for two to three minutes, with the option of asking for a second topic and no third choice offered; the panel then took the candidate through an interview covering motivation, preparedness, basic subject knowledge from the undergraduate degree and an understanding of social and economic factors, per the institute's own description. Assessment dates were assigned individually inside the application portal, the link went live two days before, and TISS refused date changes outright.

That two-stage architecture did not long outlive the test. In the first cycle after the test was dropped, TISS gave the CUET PG score 75 per cent and kept the Online Assessment at 25 per cent, as its weightage notice for that admission records. Its current criteria for selection put the national score at 100 per cent weightage on both the CUET and non-CUET routes and state that there will be no extempore reflection test, group discussion or online personal interview on either. The interview did not vanish altogether: the same document still gives an online personal interview 30 per cent for the two management programmes TISS later moved onto CAT scores. What ended with TISSNET is the arrangement in which a written paper and an interview together settled every TISS admission.

Where it is accepted

Participating institutes

Every seat TISSNET led to was a TISS seat, and the institute's own cut-off tables are the roster, organised by campus: Mumbai, Hyderabad and Tuljapur in one table, Guwahati in its own.

Guwahati sat apart from the other three even then. TISS reserves 66 per cent of the seats there for candidates from the eight states of North-East India, with a quota allotted to each state, and leaves the remaining 34 per cent to candidates from the rest of the country, per its reservation policy. That is why its cut-offs were struck state by state while the other three campuses worked from a single set of category columns.

Get help

Contact

TISS routes admission queries through a single helpline it calls TISS CARE, on 022-25525252, with admissionsinfo@tiss.ac.in as the email address, both published on its postgraduate admissions page. There is no TISSNET desk, because there is no TISSNET.

The institute also states on its admissions home page that it takes no responsibility for information provided by any source other than that site and the helpline number. That disclaimer covers the archived TISSNET notices as much as anything in the current cycle.

Source

Official links

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer

TISSNET is no longer conducted. This page is kept as a record of a former exam and is written in the past tense; it is not a guide to a live admission route. Expertie does not conduct any exam, process applications or charge fees.

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