IIT faculty wants JEE to stay
Guarding brand IIT, faculties are not ready to bid farewell to IIT-JEE, opposing the Ministry of Human Resource and Development's (MHRD) proposal to merge IIT-JEE and AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Exam), and start holding a single national entrance test for all centrally funded tech schools, from the year 2013. The combined entrance test would allow students to target institutes including the IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) through a single entrance test. Know more
The IIT faculties have also expressed reservations against the idea of 40 per cent weightage to be given to class XII board marks during selection of students for admission. They want board scores to remain only as an eligibility criterion for the JEE.
Hoping to arrive at a consensus with the IIT faculties, the ministry allowed the institutes to hold another round of deliberations over the past two weeks before a final decision can be taken in June.
The outcome of the discussions among the senate of IIT Kanpur and the faculty associations in Delhi, Mumbai and Kharagpur is in favour of the IIT-JEE continuing in its present form for the next few years.
Though open to the combined national entrance test from 2014 (Kharagpur wants to defer it for a few years), but only as a preliminary screening test, the concerned faculty wants IIT-JEE to be the final exam, pointing to a two-tier exam system for entrance to premier tech schools. Teachers suggest making IIT-JEE an advanced subjective-type exam from its present form as an objective-type exam.
The faculty association is apprehensive of admitting students through the proposed combined national test replacing IIT-JEE, at least for the next two or three years before the IITs can examine the effectiveness of the proposed national test.
Next month, the ministry will hold a meeting with the IIT Council, the institutes' apex decision-making body, to consider the views of all the senates. Finally, The Central Advisory Board of Education, the apex advisory body on education, will arrive at a decision on the matter.
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IIT-JEE and AIEEE merging – is this good news for students?
