Engineering admissions: Single entrance proposal resurfaces

Quoting a senior official of the MHRD (Ministry of Human Resources Development), a report appeared in New Delhi stating that the union government is committed to holding a common test for admissions into BE, BTech and BArch.

This proposal is yet to be ratified by the MHRD and more over, it will be in the hands of IITs as well as the next government at the centre.

The score of the single exam can be taken by any institution- be it state engineering colleges, NITs, CFTIs or even private colleges. Government is of the opinion that single test would ease the burden of multiple tests. The report said since many students have been spending more money for applying to many institutions and also travelling to various places to write the exam, single exam is of utmost necessity.

It may be recalled that Kapil Sibal, former HRD minister mooted the proposal of AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination) but IITs had scuttled the plan and after a year of intense discussions, the present two-tier examination of JEE Main and JEE Advanced was conceived.

IITs, which have functional independence, felt erosion of standards after introduction of objective mode in 2006, reverted it with a two-tier mode in 2012.

However, this two-tier system has drawn flak from all sections across the country due to the normalisation formula adopted in JEE Main. Several bright students, though come out on top in JEE Main examination, have ended up in getting ranks which is 300-400 places away from the toppers in final rankings. This anomaly was challenged in courts of law and still there were no concrete steps from the IITs to rectify this.

Even for JEE Advanced which is the final exam for entry into IITs, the norm of ‘only the top 1.5 lakh can compete’ has also been widely criticised.

This year the results for JEE (Mains) that will allow 1.5 lakh students to appear for JEE (Advanced) to get through IITs and Indian School of Mines (ISM), Dhanbad is expected on Saturday. Apart from the JEE, several states hold separate entrance tests for admission to institutes run by them and private institution.

The results of JEE Main will be declared on May 3 (Saturday) and CBSE plans to release the All Indian Ranks on July 7 after all the Boards sent the marks lists of students (both the years) for normalisation.