IIT Faculty Federation flays new format for common entrance test

In the backdrop of government's announcement to hold a common entrance test for undergraduate programmes in IITs under a new format, the Faculty federation of the institutes today alleged the new pattern would erode the autonomy of the elite institutions.

"As far as holding the test is concerned, the new format will erode the autonomous status enjoyed by IITs," said President of Faculty Federation of IIT Delhi, Sanjeev Sanghi, adding they have written a letter to Prime Minister Manmonhan Singh today in this regard.u00a0

Sanghi also regretted the decision to hold the test under the new format from 2013, saying their plea to hold it from 2014 has been rejected. "This will create a big problem because the IITs will be left with no time to conduct a dry run to assess the new format," he said.

The HRD Ministry had recently announced a new format for the IIT entrance under which the plus two Board results of the candidates will also be taken into consideration. Under the prescribed format, for admission to all centrally-funded institutes, there would be 40 percentage weightage for performance in Class XII (after normalisation of marks), 30 per cent weightage to performance in main and 30 per cent in the advanced test.

In case of IITs, there would be a filtering process involved. The Board results and the main test will be given 50 per cent weightage each. Only the top 50,000 students will be selected for the advance test after taking into account their performance in the board results and the main result.
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