With the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and other engineering colleges only 45 days away, officials at the Ministry of Education (MoE) on November 21 said they would write to all States to encourage aspirants to utilise the newly launched portal for exam preparation — SATHEE (Self Assessment Test and Help for Entrance Exams). The online coaching platform has been launched by the MoE and IIT-Kanpur.
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Whereas private coaching centres and portals seek payment, SATHEE is an open learning platform available to students at no cost. “A barrier for students who could not pay to access any such training programme has been bridged now,” Prof. S. Ganesh, Director, IIT-Kanpur said.
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SATHEE has launched a 45-day crash course for aspirants to test their level of preparation. “SATHEE hosts live and recorded lectures, expertly designed curriculum, and doubt-clearing sessions [for students] to brush up their knowledge,” Prof. Ganesh said.
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About 5,000 students from the Kendriya Vidyalayas, Navodaya Vidyalayas, and schools under the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) have registered on the platform so far. MoE officials said the goal is to reach 1,00,000 students.
The portal uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to interact with students, and can be customised to each student’s pace of learning. SATHEE’s integrated AI chatbot helps students align their learning needs. “The initiative is in line with the National Education Policy, with the goal to provide inclusive, high quality education even to remote parts of the country,” Prof. Ganesh added.
Pan India mock tests tests are held every weekend, with the same look and feel adopted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for conducting the JEE. “This will entail subject-wise tests, questions not attempted marked in a certain colour, detailed performance analysis, and so on,” an MoE official closely working with the portal said.
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“The time an aspirant student takes to crack a question versus that taken by a student of IIT-Kanpur will be mapped, and so on. At times, senior students studying in the IITs also employ novel shortcuts to crack the question. This feedback will be shared with aspirants,” the official said.
SATHEE hosts lectures and video content prepared by Professors and students of the IITs, and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). With National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) scheduled to take place in May, courses for NEET preparation will be hosted soon, officials said.
Currently, digital learning material is available on the SATHEE portal in four languages — English, Hindi, Odia, and Telugu. “We will soon be launching in Bengali, and plan to extend it to 13 languages,” the official said.
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Sanjay Kumar, Secretary (School Education), MoE said that there are about 28,000 CBSE schools, and many students in these schools were already aligned with some form of paid coaching or another. “There may be some reticence in uptake of SATHEE. Hence, we should ensure that we monitor through Google tracker on a weekly basis, school-wise, so as to how many students are getting registered, and how many students are using the portal,” Mr. Kumar said.
Officials also said that by January or February, the portal intends to provide lectures and live courses on all National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) syllabus topics. “This will involve refresher courses for Class 11 and [Class] 12 students, and later for Class 9 and [Class] 10 students. This is because Classes 9 and 10’s topics form the foundational basis for the higher classes,” the officials said.
“Making the portal ‘entrance exam agnostic’ will help more students access it to prepare for their Board exams too,” Mr. Kumar said.
The MoE is also studying analytics data released by the NTA to check which States have lower number of students enrolling for entrance tests. “We are involving SATHEE mitras (friends) to increase rural coverage of students appearing for entrance tests, including the JEE and NEET,” the MoE official said.