IIT-Delhi Teachers’ Association president Sanjeev Sanghi strongly argued in favour of introducing the new IIT-JEE from 2014 as several issues still had to be sorted out and students’ preparations too were not in tune with the new proposals.
Weightage
Expressing his views at a seminar on ‘Irrational Reforms in the IIT Entrance,’ organised by the Government Junior Lecturers’ Association, Andhra Pradesh, here on Friday, he said there was still confusion as to whether the language paper marks would be considered for Intermediate weightage and whether the different State boards were ready to provide the percentile data of top 20 per cent students on their boards. Some boards consider only 12 class marks for the final marks while some consider both the 11 and 12 marks and even the OBC list was different in each State.
He said such issues need to be clarified so that students could prepare in advance. “It’s unfair to thrust the new method on the aspirants after the commencement of the academic year. They should be given enough time to change their preparation style,” he said arguing that it should be introduced from 2014. Prof. Sanghi had led a delegation of IIT teachers to discuss with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the controversy.
Dry run
Prof. Sanghi felt that the government should have done a dry run with the data of 2012 or 2011 to see whether any problems crop up while introducing the 12 class weightage marks or normalising the scores of different boards. “Nothing of that sort has been done and it reflects how changes were being thought of without anticipating problems,” he said.
He felt that IIT senates might propose some changes like increasing the eligibility for 25 or 30 per cent of the Boards instead of top 20 per cent, or exempting the top 500 rankers from this norm and making the JEE advanced test subjective than objective.
The changes, he felt, have not really reflected the purpose they were proposed for. Changes were proposed as “One test one nation” but at the end of the exercise students still have to write the same number of entrance tests.
Irrational
Mr. Ramaiah, MLC and IIT trainer, said it was unfortunate that eligibility of student was being decided after completing the three tests -- Intermediate, JEE Main and JEE-Advanced. The new pattern was irrational in such scenario.
He felt the exam had become a contentious issue between the HRD Ministry and the IITs and new changes were more of a compromise than actually brining more rationale argument into the changed pattern. He said the IITs should concentrate on research but the new developments have dragged the IITs into the admission controversy.
GJLA president, P. Madhusudhan Reddy also spoke.
