IIT Madras agrees to Centres JEE proposal

Updated on: Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Indian Institute of Technology – Madras is ready to go with the Centre's Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) from the next academic year for admission to its undergraduate engineering courses, Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT-M, said on Saturday.

After the original request came from the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development, the IIT-M's Senate had a fairly thorough discussion in its 254 meeting on May 3 and recommended two options for ranking candidates for admission to IITs.

Deliberating on the proposal for the new JEE based on a single examination, the Senate favoured a single-day entrance examination consisting of a main test with multiple choice questions in mathematics, physics and chemistry and an advanced quantitative test based on the same subjects.

The latter test would have problems with numerical answers, possibly in multiple parts.

Option one was the introduction of the concept of gating. All candidates with weighted marks above a pre-announced Minimum Qualifying Mark (MQM) would be considered for ranking using the marks obtained in the advanced quantitative paper.

Stating that this was its preferred option, IIT-M's Senate suggested using weighted mark obtained from Board percentile rank (0.4) + main test marks (0.6) to be used for gating purpose alone. The Centre's proposal has given it a 50-50 weightage. Otherwise, the proposal is pretty much the same as recommended by the IIT-M Senate, says Mr. Ramamurthi.

It also strongly recommended that advanced quantitative marks alone be used for ranking the candidates for IIT admission. Only those candidates with the weighted mark higher than the pre-announced MQM will be ranked using the advanced quantitative paper marks. This recommendation is also in sync with the Centre's proposal.

(The weights recommended by the Senate for the three components, namely, Board percentile rank, JEE-Main marks and JEE-Advanced marks are given in brackets).

As the Council of IITs was eager to include the weightage of Board marks for screening, option two suggested a formula of weighted mark obtained from Board percentile rank (0.2) + main test marks (0.4) + advanced quantitative test marks (0.4) to be used for ranking candidates for IIT admission.

In this option, the IIT-M Senate basically suggested reduction in weightage given to Board marks. “We came up with the second option since we need not go back and forth,” said Mr. Ramamurthi emphasising that the institute was ready to admit students as per the new JEE from 2013 itself.

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