Does the IIT entrance need a rejig?

GN Bureau | October 3, 2011



Infosys co-founder N R Narayanamurthy has claimed that nearly 80 percent of the students who crack the IIT entrances are of questionable calibre. He punched holes in the IITs' selection procedure saying that it took no more than coaching institutions getting students to mug a set of problems to crack the entrance exam.

The HRD ministry has proposed a sharing of weightage between a SAT-like test (doing away with the decades old IIT-JEE) and performance in Class 12 board exams. Though the proposal is hardly a holistic way of marking eligibles, the ministry is hedging its bets with it. However, groups of IITians (currently at college and alumni who have graduated) have opposed the move online saying that the JEE is "good enough and time-tested" and that the weightage for board performances will be unnecessarily complicated with students from many boards appearing the exam.

While Narayanmurthy may have indeed pointed at a systemic flaw in the selection procedure, he also undermined the stringency and the screening capabilities of the test. After all, it is this 'subpar' students who make the cut from a pool of a few lakhs. But at the same time, it can't be ignored that the tests are hardly holistic, thereby ignoring many attributes that are necessary to maintain quality of students at the apex institutes.

Thus, our poser is if the IIT entrance really needs a rejig or not.

Comments

 

Other News

Wired for good: Building sustainable cities with AI

The First Industrial Revolution in the 18th-19th centuries ushered in a paradigm shift in how cities were imagined. Fueled by railways, factories and grids, and obsessed with speed and scale, it was an ode to efficiency, which spurred unprecedented economic growth. Now, as the Fourth Industrial Revolutio

How social media is reshaping elections

Since Brazil’s return to direct presidential elections in 1985, no candidate who finished second in the first round of polling had ever won the presidency. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, now 81, has just done it. What explains the comeback, and what changed in Brazilian politics to make it possi

Cabinet approves Dearness Allowance, Dearness Relief

The union cabinet chaired by prime minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday approved the release of an additional instalment of Dearness Allowance (DA) to central government employees and Dearness Relief (DR) to pensioners with effect from 01.07.2026 representing an increase of 3% over the existing rates of 6

Cyclone Arnab strikes Andhra as warming oceans amplify storm risks

Cyclone Arnab made landfall along the Andhra Pradesh and Yanam coasts in the early hours of Wednesday as a very severe cyclonic storm, with maximum sustained wind speeds of 125–135 kmph and gusts reaching 150 kmph. Its rapid intensification has raised concerns about how warmer oceans, global warmin

Counting matters but which ones?

The first instinct of public policy is to count. Its harder task is to count what counts. We have become remarkably good at measuring the reach of the welfare state vis-à-vis beneficiaries covered, rupees transferred, houses built, connections installed and services delivered. But some of the most

Inching closer to a trade deal with America

The cooperation between India and the United States goes back quite a time. We need to relegate that era to the backburner when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru visited US in the times of president Dwight Eisenhower and called the American let-off of 10 million dollars in defence aid to Pakistan as a “gun w

Upcoming Conferences



-->

Archives

Current Issue

Opinion

Facebook Twitter Google Plus Linkedin Subscribe Newsletter

Twitter