Merger of JEE and AIEEE will lower IIT standards: FIITJEE

Kolkata: Leading engineering tutorial institute FIITJEE voiced concerns over the proposed move of the government to merge the IITJEE and AIEEE exams and claimed it could lower the quality of prestigious IIT’s.


“This decision will lower the standards of IIT. Already, IIT's have been criticised for lack of quality and this decision may be a big blow as we do not know what change will follow in the opening and closing ranks of IITs,” R L Trikha, Director of FIITJEE Limited, told reporters here.

“JEE was a major factor that gave IIT's the exclusivity that they command today. A student preparing for JEE prepared for the test with the sole purpose of entering IIT and not a regional engineering college,” he said.

The recent decision of the Union Ministry of Human Resource and Development of merging IIT Joint Entrance Exams (JEE) and All India Engineering Entrance Exams (AIEEE) has stirred mixed reaction among students and academicians.

If everything falls in place, by 2013, there will be a common entrance test for all government engineering colleges. Another significant change is that along with the test scores, a student's 12th standard marks will have 40 per cent weightage.

“School boards like CBSE, ICSE are easier to score than compared to state boards. This is unfair to students appearing for state boards compared to CBSE. For states like Bihar, the state board awards lower  marks than the national boards,” Trikha contended.

He suggested a better option would be to have multiple rounds of screening tests, rather than giving 40 per cent weightage to 12th standard results.

“There is also a need for uniform syllabus, since different boards have different marking systems, which needs to be standardised. And lastly, students will face immense pressure as there's a single exam to make it or break it,” the FIITJEE official said.

New JEE to blur class XII marks bias

New Delhi: The new single Joint Entrance Examination being proposed for admission to Indian Institutes Technology/ National Institutes of Technology/ Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research/ Indian Institutes of Information Technology and state government-run engineering colleges would not have a uniform weightage to class XII results.

Sources said while there would be a single-test, class XII weightage would have variations that would cater to needs of different engineering colleges and state governments. For instance, the source said, “Weightage given to class XII result would be different for admission to IIT and for other engineering colleges. Weightage would be even state-specific. There would be a band of weightage that institutes and state governments would be free to choose from.”

Variation has been devised to deal with concerns of the state governments, many of whom feel that due to different system of evaluation in each state, students from low-scoring states should not be discriminated. In Tamil Nadu, admission to state government-run engineering colleges is on the basis of class XII marks and not any entrance test. “For states like Tamil Nadu, weightage for class XII has to be different from what it would be in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh,” the source said. The T Ramasami committee working on a new single JEE has not made public findings of analysis of past data of school boards that was done by Indian Statistical Institute last year.

ISI’s report accessed by TOI shows that it was not even made part of any presentation. The report, while analysing data of CBSE, ICSE, Tamil Nadu board and West Bengal board, found that class XII scores from these boards are not comparable. It said, “Since the subject scores do not appear to be comparable, the question of combining them for comparability of aggregate scores across the boards does not arise.” A meeting of state education ministers has been called later this month. In case, state governments do not come on board, the ministry is planning to go ahead with a single entrance test for Central government-run engineering institutions from 2014.