Many bottlenecks before JEE 2013 is formalised
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MHRD and IITs may have compromised on the new Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) for all centrally-funded engineering colleges across India, but implementing it next year is the biggest battle.
Less than a year is left for JEE 2013 to sort out procedures for the new exam. Here, are some of the bottlenecks that need to be cleared for JEE 2013:
- Results of all boards will have to be cleared before the second week of June next year, so that engineering colleges can finalize their student selection process. For this, many boards will have to alter their exam schedules.
- A profile of high school students still needs to be prepared detailing caste-based quotas. Authentic caste data at the board level is not easily available. Moreover, school boards will have to prepare percentile lists separately for general category, backward classes, scheduled castes and tribe, which can be quite daunting.
- More than two million students appear for Class XII board examinations every year across 29 school boards in India. Last year, about 5 lakh students sat for IIT JEE. There is still no clarity on how the expanded test will be conducted and when the dry runs of the new exam will take place. Without proper implementation, the situation may lead to that of CAT 2009, when it switched from pen-and-paper format to a computer-based format.
- There is confusion in the Top 20 percentile concept too.
- It is not clear whether all the students who appear for Class XII will be considered or only those students who clear Class XII exams will be considered.
- It also needs to be clarified if only the students with Maths, Chemistry, and Physics in Class XII as subjects will be considered in this percentile list.
- Other confusions about the issue include whether the marks of only these three subjects will be used to calculate the percentile list or Top 5 or Top 6 subjects (as done in different boards) will be taken into consideration.
HRD Ministry is hoping to clear out all confusions soon, with the help of IITs.
IIT Bombay senate meeting to fine-tune the compromise formula had to be postponed to the end of July as the minutes of the IIT Council meeting on June 27 are still not out, and after mid-July, the institute will be busy with its admission-related work. It might suggest a relaxation in board cut-offs for 2013. They also want to restrict the number of students appearing for Advanced exam to 50,000 as proposed earlier. They want JEE Advanced to be subjective, which require more manual resource for checking the sheets. This will not be possible if 1.5 lakh students are allowed to sit for the exam.
IIT Madras senate has already agreed to the compromise formula.
Meanwhile, coaching institutes have increased their fees by up to 15 per cent. At present, a two-year IIT coaching programme costs anywhere between Rs 1.2 lakh to Rs 1.8 lakh. But now, the coaching institutes will have to focus more on board exams and take additional tests to gauge a student’s preparation for boards. Many institutes are also planning to tie-up with colleges to offer coaching or start pre-university colleges for Class XII, which will focus on preparing students for admission to IITs.
HRD Minister Kapil Sibal is upbeat about the CET though. He claimed that a countrywide common entrance test for engineering and medical colleges are likely to implemented in the next four years.
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