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.