IITs likely to stop online counseling

Initiating a new change in the admission process from the next academic year, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) plans to do away with the online counselling soon, which was followed for several years for admission at IITs. Starting next year, students will have to go to the respective IITs in person for admission rather than appearing for online counseling. Students will also have to produce original certificates for verification during counselling.

The necessity for change in the admission procedure was felt to check fraudulent tactics used by a few aspirants after two candidates impersonated others in JEE 2012 to secure admissions into IIT-Bhubaneswar and ISM-Dhanbad this year. They were caught. Over five lakh candidates take the test each year to qualify for around 10,000 seats in the 15 IITs, Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and Indian School of Mines (ISM) in Dhanbad. There have been instances of students trying to seek admission through fraudulent means in the past.

H C Gupta, organising chairman of JEE (Advanced) 2013 believes that online counselling is one of the factors facilitating such incidents of fraud as an institute cannot identify fake students unless the candidate is interacted with in person.

Henceforth, students will only be allowed to fill the options online, and will have physical counselling at the seven IITs. To make things foolproof, efforts are also on to verify the students' identities biometrically.

The major change in JEE to be implemented from next year is that the entrance exam will be divided into two parts - JEE (Main) and JEE (Advanced). The JEE (main) will serve as a screening test  to select the top 1,50,000 candidates to appear for the JEE (Advanced), for admission to the undergraduate programmes offered by the IITs.

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