Kapil Sibal and IIT Entrance

Kapil Sibal has triggered the debate again, this time on the procedure for entrance to the IITs. The Human Resource Development minister said on October 19 that the selection criteria for admission to the IITs should not be solely the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) but weightage should also be given to the results of the board exams. He talked about raising the cut-off marks for IIT entrance from 60% to 80-85% in the board exams.

In defense of his proposal he said that this step will not only ensure that the students pay more attention to board exams but also check the mushrooming of coaching centers all over the country. He asserted that this step will ensure greater attention by students to their board exams rather than a lop-sided focus on the study material provided by the coaching centres.

The minister is not wrong when he says that the coaching centres make every student dream that they can make to the IIT’s and for that dream they charge anything between Rs 50,000 to 2 lakhs. Not everybody is capable of paying such amounts but parents somehow manage to pay only to make sure that their child ends up in one of the IIT’s. Also the coaching for the IIT-JEE start from Std 8 when students don’t really know what their area of interest is. Students who take science in +2 are sometimes forced by their parents to prepare for the JEE.

His statement drew a lot of criticism from the students and some ex-IITians .They are of the view that raising the limit is not a sound move as the grading pattern of the CBSE/ICSE is very different from the state boards. This step will further add to the problems of the poor students who don’t score 80% and above in their board exams.

Out of the 3.75 lakh students who appeared for JEE this year, 55,000 were from Andra Pradesh. A study cited that out of the 8295 students who got selected into the IIT’s this year, 2500 were from Andhra Pradesh and out of those 2500, 1000 students did not score above 80% in their board exams.

Some ex-IITans, who did not score 80% in their board exams but have managed to crack the IIT-JEE, feel that it is unnecessary to raise the cut-off. According to them board exams should not be the criteria for getting into the IITs. Cracking the IIT entrance is all about intelligence and that should not be associated with the board results. They further opine that the coaching centres give them some quick tips to solve complex problems that are a part of the question paper for the IIT entrance exam.

All these and many other reactions probably made the minister to backtrack from what he had said a day earlier. He said that 80% is not a prerequisite for IIT entrance and that it is up to the IITs to decide on the selection procedure and his ministry has nothing to do, either directly or indirectly, with their functioning. He said that a committee will be formed which will revise the system for entrance to the IITs by 2011. Sibal on Tuesday clarified that the only decision that had been taken by the IIT Council was that the IITs would submit a report in January next year on "rationalizing the JEE".