NEW DELHI: India's top engineering institutes do not want any changes in the way they admit students at undergraduate level. Indian Institute of Technology Council-the top decision-making body for the IITs, on Monday, rejected a suggestion by the Union Human Resources Development Ministry to make changes in Joint Entrance Examination-Advanced-the entrance test for the admission into the prestigious institutions.
The annual meeting of the Council, in which directors of all 23 IITs participated, was chaired by HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar as is the practice. "It was decided that there would be no changes in JEE-Advanced this year," said Javadekar after the meeting.
HRD secretary (higher education) R Subrahmanyam said that "there was a consensus that the current process of admission into B Tech programmes should not be tampered up." "IITs that JEE-Advanced is a well-settled system and the examination was conducted only in online mode from 2018 which should be first allowed to stabilize," the secretary explained. "Also, there have already been some efforts to test the application of knowledge through the online mode."
The Ministry had mooted the proposal for making some systemic changes in the admission test as this year, a small pool of just about 18,000 students had managed to qualify the test, than what was required to fill about 12,800 seats on offer.
On the government's intervention, IIT Kanpur-the organising institute of JEE-Advanced 2018 -lowered the cut-off and included about 13,000 more students in the list of about 18,000 earlier announced as having qualified. "We felt there was a problem because the entrance test pattern followed by the IITs is too strict and the difficulty level of questions is too high but this is not time yet to make the reforms that some from within IITs had suggested," a senior HRD official said.
An IIT director who did not want to be named said that IITs have built their brand value based on the excellent quality of students and any dilution of the toughness of entrance test could be "disastrous".
The key decisions in IIT Council.
-No revision in tuition fee being charged for B Tech programmes.
-No changes inJEE-Advanced.
-IITs will organize annual tech-fests demonstrating various innovations and technologies developed by them, at any suitable venue with participation from CEOs from leading public and private sector organizations.
-The Boards of Governors of the individual IITs have been empowered to decide the fee for international students.
-The issue of vacant seats in the M.Tech. programmes in IITs due to the student joining Public Sector Undertakings after being admitted will be addressed in a meeting with the CMDs of major PSUs to be held under the chairmanship of the Minister of Human Resource Development.
-A Committee comprising of Directors of IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad and IIT Tirupati has been constituted to recommend standards and norms for construction of campuses and infrastructure projects in IITs.