Pros and cons of single engineering entrance

By Ruchi Shrimali

Recently, there has been much hue and cry over quality of Indian institutions, including premier institutions like IITs and IIMs. World Bank even suggested India to raise its education quality to international standards. Read on...

Earlier, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy too had complained that the quality of students getting in IITs is deteriorating. According to him, only top 20% of IITians are among the best at the global level while remaining 80% are average in performance. He had blamed coaching classes for this deterioration. He had also suggested that government should give more autonomy to IITs and IIT governing councils should comprise IIT alumni. Know what Narayana Murthy said...

To address these issues, Union HRD Minister, Mr. Kapil Sibal, planned to make changes in the engineering entrance tests first.

As a first step, Sibal wants to introduce a common engineering entrance test for all colleges across India. It will raise the bar for entrance to engineering colleges other than IITs and NITs and also reduce the number of exams students have to take to get access to a seat in an engineering college. This entrance exam will be introduced in 2013. It will not only be a merger of AIEEE and IIT-JEE but will also give weight to Class 12 marks of a student.

However, not everybody is happy with the decision. Academicians agree that IIT-JEE maintains high standards of screening students and is able to attract best brains for the IITs. Standardizing it will mean that while other engineering colleges will be able to attract better quality of students, IITs themselves will have to make do with lowering of their entry standards.

The proposal to give weightage to class 12 results has also received flak from education experts, who thing that the move will have an effect contrary to what government has assumed. Now, instead of paying more attention to their Class 12 board exams and depend less on coaching classes, students will enroll in coaching classes for both engineering entrance exam as well as Class 12. This will increase their stress levels too.

According to academicians, real challenges that government needs to address at this point are:

• Investment in quality faculty and research facilities. IITs are short of faculty by 30 per cent at present, i.e., 2,500 faculty members need to be recruited in IITs.
• Not to lower entry barriers. Reservation of OBCs in IITs have already had a negative impact on the campuses. Due to OBC quota, there were an addition of 54% seats to IITs but they have been unable to recruit adequate number of faculty members to maintain their education standards.
• Complete autonomy for IITs and NITs, just like Harvard. They should not be dependent on government for their funds and should be financially independent. They should not compromise on quality and encourage their alma mater to invest in them, so that they can hire best brains as faculty members. With enough fund raising, they can even subsidize studies of deserving candidates.

In the current scenario, India's richest people are funding Harvard more than IITs or IIMs, because of their quality. It is because foreign universities refuse to compromise with their quality and maintain an autonomous status for the purpose. IITs, IIMs, and other premier Indian institutions need to follow the same way.

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