The Academic Evaluation Centre (APS India) is a service provider of the Science section of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, New Delhi established in 2022. It claims to facilitate a hassle-free admissions process for Indian students to German universities by authenticating their
documents. But, the situation on ground is very dire. There are many instances of students waiting for 6 months for their certification and many deferring an intake wasting another 6months of their career.

APS process involves payment of application fees of Rs.18,000/- and filling of online application form. further, students have to manually send the photocopies of original certificates to APS Delhi address.  After which, students are contacted via phone call intimating about an email sent to the college professor for student verification. Once  college sends student verification, an electronic APS is issued through an Email. Only with this certificate students can apply for a VISA or University application.

 A great criticism from students is that there is no clear timeline, accountability and an organized structure in the APS process. Even after paying an unreasonable amount of Rs.18,000/-, APS India failed to provide minimum intimation about the receipt of hard copies through post. This creates a lot of panic in students as APS India processes their application in chronological order based on date of receipt of documents. Just imagine the plight of the students who find out that the courier service provider failed to deliver their documents after waiting for 6months. 

The certificate verification process, firstly, APS asks for Link and credentials of the student portal of the college/university. Many colleges in India do not have such portals or access to such portal ceases after graduation. Secondly, They will check whether the results of the students are available on the university/ college website. Most of the Indian universities do not retain their online results for more than one year. Thirdly, they accept Digilocker Certificates but there are very few colleges which enable  digilocker. Lastly, They accept a reply from the professor to APS's Email asking for student verification.

Irony is that, in Germany almost all of its bureaucracy including APS application is done through manual paper based process but APS doesn't want to believe transcript based student verification which is followed by World Education Service(WES) of USA and Canada.

Students demand a specific time frame from APS and also digitalization of APS application process since there is no difference in sending photocopies and uploading documents online. APS must accept paper based student verification from colleges/universities and also submit itself to accountability by refunding application fees if it fails to provide a certificate within time. APS must make its functioning transparent by publishing live colleges priority lists on which it is currently working on and the chronological order in which it is processing the applications.