Alumni drive to save IIT-JEE

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | Alumni drive to save IIT-JEE

Alumni drive to save IIT-JEE
CHARU SUDAN KASTURI

New Delhi, June 5: Kapil Sibal’s proposal to abolish the IIT Joint Entrance Examination has triggered a wave of protests from the alumni of India’s premier engineering schools, leaving a worried government scurrying for a response.

Over 1,300 IIT alumni from diverse professions and from across the globe have joined a “save JEE” volunteers team and signed an online petition that was started on April 5 against the move to disband the IIT entrance examination.

A core “save JEE” team of 31 alumni has sent the petition to the Prime Minister, all MPs and to Sibal, the human resource development (HRD) minister.

The petition dubs the IIT-JEE the “gold standard for engineering entrance examinations” and demands that it be retained.

“This appeal is for the Government of India to set up an ‘Independent Commission’ to correct the flaws and abuses in the JEE system, and not to abolish the methodology,” the petition says.

The Telegraph had reported on March 24 that the HRD ministry had asked a panel of IIT directors to consider scrapping the IIT-JEE.

The panel, headed by IIT Kharagpur director Damodar Acharya, was also asked to suggest a way to replace the JEE and other engineering entrance examinations held across the country — including state government engineering tests — with a common aptitude test.

The Acharya panel has since then recommended that a common examination testing students on parameters other than their knowledge of physics, chemistry and mathematics can indeed replace the IIT-JEE and other engineering tests.

But this common test would carry only 30 per cent weight in admissions to undergraduate engineering courses, with students’ scores in their Class XII board examinations accounting for the remaining 70 per cent, the panel had proposed.

The panel is now meeting the various stakeholders. It has told the HRD ministry that it may need to revise its proposals based on the feedback. HRD ministry sources said the petition from the IIT alumni had been sent to the Acharya panel, which has been asked to firm up a response.