The council of IITs today proposed a pan-India common entrance aptitude test for admission to engineering programmes — in IITs and other colleges as well — possibly from 2013.
This will replace the current system of a joint entrance examination for IITs and separate tests for state engineering colleges. Officials said private colleges can use this test too.
Another proposal is to weaken the clout of coaching institutes by giving weightage to Class XII exam results. However, states need to be on board with a normalization process given that each has its own board examinations.
Announcing this after a five-hour meeting of the Council of IITs, which has also agreed to the proposal, Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal, however, said that the proposed move to have in place a common entrance test for all engineering colleges across the country will be subject to approval by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) and the state governments.
“We have decided there shall be one exam and will try and put that into operation from 2013,” Sibal said.
The Council of IITs indicated that students who get admission to the premier engineering schools might end up paying a substantial amount towards cost of their education.
The Kakodkar committee had recommended raising the fees to Rs 2 lakh a year. Sibal said this would be factored in but IIT fees would remain the same at Rs 50,000 per year .The cost factor for an IIT for each students now stands at around Rs 8 lakh against the Rs 2 lakh paid over the entire duration of the BTech programme. He said the implementation of the Kakodkar panel recommendation, which sought to raise the tuition fee to Rs 2 lakh a year, was “not possible”, in the interests of all sections of society.
In the context of the pan-India common entrance test, Sibal said an all-India merit list would be prepared based on the combined weightage given to Class XII examinations and to a common test. The test would examine a students’ logic and non-subject matters.
He said weightage would be given to the marks obtained in Class XII boards after the results “are equalised for which Indian Statistical Institute will put in place a mathematical formula for equalisation.”