Single entrance test for centrally funded technical institutions, IITs & NITs from 2013: Kapil Sibal
Students who wish to pursue their career into engineering stream would be required to share one platform. The admissions to all centrally funded technical institutes (CFTIs) in the India, including the IITs and the NITs, will be directed to appear only one entrance test from 2013. Accordingly, the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) for admission to IITs and the All-India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) for admission to NITs and other engineering and technical colleges will be discontinued. This decision had been taken in a meeting held under the chairmanship of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, between the councils of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the National Institutes of Technology (NITs). The supreme decision taking authority empowered by the IIT Act and the NIT Act, agreed to switch to a new format of a common entrance test.
The final score of the test will be calculated by adding the weitage of Class XII marks (normalized across state boards through an equalization formula developed by the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata), along with marks obtained by the students in the two components of the new single test i.e. JEE main and JEE advanced, both to be held on the same day. On a special note IITs have, however, been granted special concessions on the ground that they are considered different from the rest and have initiated experiments in technical education.
The admission process will be carried out in a systematized manner. Firstly, the IITs will shortlist the students on the basis of a merit prepared by granting weightage to them in the ratio of 50 percent for Class XII exam marks and 50 percent for marks obtained in the main component of the test. Out of this, top 50,000 scorers as per the merit list will be eligible for admission to the IITs and after that their advanced component papers alone will be evaluated by the IITs to prepare a final merit list for admissions without considering the marks school exam marks. On the contrary to it, the Non-IIT technical institutes will prepare their final merit list by assigning 40 percent weightage to school examination marks and 30 percent weightage each to the marks obtained by candidates in the main and advanced tests of the single entrance exam.
The IITs will prepare both the main and the advanced components of the common engineering test and will join other institutes on a common format by 2015. Tests will be on MCQ pattern. Our first priority was to reduce stress of exams on students and the next was to restore the importance of Class XII, which students don’t seem to take seriously, Sibal adds. The states like Haryana, Gujarat and Maharashtra have agreed to join the new format instead of having separate exams for state engineering colleges.