Admissions to IITs & NITs through JEE Advanced?

A proposal by the NIT council’s standing committee will be taken up by the IIT council next week. The proposal suggests that the admission of students to both IITs and NITs should be through a single entrance exam – the JEE Advanced.

The NIT council will take up the proposal at its meeting on 1st October while the IIT council –the apex body that coordinates between IITs and the HRD ministry – will discuss the matter at its meeting scheduled for 6th October.

If reports are to be believed, Smriti Irani-led HRD ministry favours the proposal of single examination, however, the move is expected to trigger a controversy in the IIT system.

IITs have been resisting any such moves to grant NITs parity but the HRD ministry had to take a call and make IITs agree to a joint counselling with NITs.

Officials, requesting anonymity, informed Economic Times, "IITs and NITs draw from the same pool of students. IITs already draw the best of students through the JEE Advanced which has a reasonably high difficulty level. If the NITs — which are also excellent engineering institutes — are allowed to draw from that pool, the overall quality will improve. The aim is one exam, one ranking system and one counselling for both IITs and NITs."

If the proposal gets a nod by the council, the JEE Advanced examination will be picking up around 34,000 candidates. Currently, it selects about 10,000 students for all the 16 branches of the IITs across India.

The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) alone determines admissions to prestigious IITs. While it was the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) that earlier determined admissions to the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and all other engineering colleges, the format was changed when Kapil Sibal was HRD minister in UPA-II.
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