The Ministry of human resource development will soon call a meeting of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Council to stamp a decision to merge the IIT-Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and All India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) conducted by the Central Board of Secondary
Education.
After much resistance, the IITs have agreed to join the ministry’s bid to have a common entrance examination for all engineering colleges in the country. This only happened after there was an agreement that several elements of IIT-JEE will be part of the new national common examination.
“The new entrance examination will have many elements of IIT-JEE as we want to ensure that the best brains join our institutes,” said an IIT director requesting anonymity, after a meeting of select IIT directors with HRD minister Kapil Sibal.
A formal meeting of the IIT Council to stamp the merger is expected in February.
IIT Kanpur director Sanjay Dande made a presentation on features of the new entrance examination aimed to evaluate skills of a student objectively.
A student’s Class 12 marks and entrance exam score will have equal weightage.
The new examination will be conducted by a joint committee of IIT and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which conducts AIEEE, and will cover all central government engineering colleges and those in seven states such as Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal, which had opted to take students on the basis of the AIEEE score.
There are 15 IITs, four Indian Institutes of Information Technology and 20 National Institutes of Technology in the country.
The HRD ministry believes that more states could join in the future and it will try to bring them on board at a meeting of state education ministers on February 15. Over 15 lakh students, including 4.85 lakh for IIT-JEE, appear for different engineering entrance tests in the country every year.
A student wanting admission in an engineering college has to take three to five entrance exams depending on the stream.