Putting an to end to speculation on a possible single entrance test across the country for admissions to engineering colleges, along the lines of NEET for medical course, the chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, on Friday said such a system was unlikely to be rolled out for admissions to the 2018-19 academic year.
On the sidelines of a programme here, the AICTE chairman said before a common examination could be introduced, the class 12 curricula of all States had to be realigned so that they are on a par with the NCERT syllabus.
Currently in Karnataka, students have to write multiple examinations to vie for a seat in an engineering college.
Admissions for government and government-quota engineering seats are based on the Common Entrance Test (CET) ranking, while private engineering colleges allot seats based on the Consortium of Medical, Engineering and Dental Colleges of Karnataka (COMEDK) rank.
Other private and deemed universities conduct their own entrance tests. For admissions to the Indian Institutes of Technology, National Institutes of Technology and other Centrally funded technical institutions, candidates have to sit for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).
Medical and dental colleges too had followed a similar system until the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test was made the only common entrance exam for across the country.
Mr. Sahasrabudhe said, “While we are convinced that there is a need for a common entrance test [for engineering admissions], we are only timing it in such a manner so that there is a level playing field once the syllabus is the same.”
About the benefits of such a system, he said a candidate who has done well in the test would have the option of applying to all good colleges across the country.
Several coaching centres and colleges in the State have stopped coaching for the Common Entrance Test and are training candidates only for an exam on the lines of the JEE as they anticipated that there would be a single exam across the country.
