Roll back of common entrance test demanded

Updated on: Friday, June 15, 2012

The IIT faculty federation, opposed to the proposed common entrance for admission in IITs and other centrally-funded technical institutes, met senior PMO officials and demanded a roll back of the decision.

A K Mittal, secretary of All India IIT Faculty Federation (AIIITFF), told after meeting PM's advisor T K A Nair, "We are encouraged with the meeting and are hopeful of a positive outcome."

The federation is also expected to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tomorrow expressing reservation to the common test.

The meeting assumes significance in the wake of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal virtually ruling out going back on the Centre's new proposal.

AIIITFF had written to the Prime Minister on May 31 saying that "each IIT is an individual and independent academic entity and should reserve its right to follow its own norms with regards to admissions and other academic matter".

Sibal, who is currently on a visit to the US, has said that the government has no intent to impinge on the autonomy of the IITs.

The government had on May 28 announced that from 2013, aspiring candidates for IITs and other central institutes like NITs and IIITs will have to sit under a new format of common entrance test, which will also take the plus-two board results into consideration.

Sibal had claimed that it was approved without dissent at a council consisting of the IITs, the IIITs and the NITs.

Delhi IIT alumni association shared a letter with the press and addressed to HRD Minister Kapil Sibal which shows IIT Kanpur's dissent over the council's decision of adopting the new test format.

Later in a statement, the federation demanded that since the new common entrance test was decided upon without proper consultation process, each IIT should now be given choices of accepting the proposed test as it is, accept it with specific conditions or riders or reject the proposed test and have own admission processes.

It reiterated that the any changes should be only from 2014 or later and the current test pattern such as JEE, AIEEE, other state entrance test should continue at least for the year 2013.

The federation insisted that board performance should be used as cut-off only instead of giving weightage to it after the process of normalisation as has been proposed under the new format.

"Since there is really no fair basis for board normalisation, do not include directly the board performance in merit list preparation. If at all it is to be considered, then give only small weightage (may be 10 per cent) to start with and then gradually increase it over 5 years to a maximum limit of 30 per cent," the statement said.

The federation also contested the two-tier format for the common test, (appearing in both main and advance test) stating that only the main be used for all institutes except the IITs to select students.

It said the advance test should be required only for the IITs.

"The IITs advance test should be subjective type, just for the candidates aspiring to join the IITs. This advance test will be held on a day different from the main test and will be administered to only shortlisted candidates from the main test (50,000-70,000) by IITs only," the statement said.

Roll back of common entrance test demanded

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