IITs to up seat count to have 14% girls on each campus

KOLKATA: The Union HRD ministry has directed all IITs to increase the number of admissions so as to ensure that each and every IIT campus has at least 14% girls in every new batch starting from 2018. The 23 campuses that will have to follow this directive include the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. 

The HRD ministry's directive is part of a larger plan to increase the proportion of female representation to 20% at India's premier engineering colleges by 2026.

"The seats will be supernumerary," explained an official. "The IITs can increase the number of seats in a way that girls form a 14% chunk of the total admissions in 2018 without reducing the number of boys who were admitted in 2017," he added.

JEE Advanced to replace MCQs with short answer questions

JEE Advanced question paper will now have short answer type questions instead of multiple choice questions (MCQs), the Joint Admission Board (JAB) – conducting body of the entrance exam has announced the same.

The announcement comes just a day after the board announced to conduct the IIT-JEE Advanced online from now onwards. So far, JEE Advanced only had MCQs for which the candidates need to mark correct answers on optical mark reading (OMR) sheets later evaluated by machines.

“The introduction of a computer-based test will give candidates access to keyboards. So, they will be able to provide correct answers through calculations, if necessary,” said a JAB official. “When the question pattern was multiple-choice, examinees often took refuge in the process of elimination to guess the answer. Now, such opportunities will be limited,” he added.

Explaining about the expected paper pattern, the official said, as there is no order about framing questions, question-setters are free to frame concept-based questions for examinees to not just rely on techniques or memorisation to crack the questions rather to apply their logic for solving the questions. The question pattern is set to change, the official added.

The decision to shift to a computerised testing system had been taken to eliminate printing errors and translation goof-ups that created problems for candidates and necessitated grace marks.

Students from 9 countries can appear directly for JEE advanced

JAB (Joint Admission Board) of IITs has decided that students from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Singapore, the UAE and Ethiopia will be allowed to directly appear for the JEE (advanced) test, skipping the JEE (main) that Indian students have to take.
“The idea has been approved in-principle. Each IITwill also ratify it and the IIT council will approve it next week,” an official said. This was being done to showcase India’s soft power. In any case, he said, foreign students would not eat into the seats meant for Indians.
The principle reason for this is to make it into the list of top educational institutes. “In all international rankings one of the key parameters is international students and IITs lose out in a big way despite scoring well on other parameters,” another official said.
“Foreign nationals will be given seats under supernumerary category,” he said. Pakistan has been left out due to home ministry’s objection.
An official said “The cost of admission will be recovered from the foreign student and the government will not bear any expense on account of foreign students. They will be given the same facilities as Indian students. ”

JEE (A) may have subjective paper in 2017

MUMBAI: IIT aspirants who cleared their class X exams this year may have to prepare for a subjective paper for their entrance test in 2017. The Joint Admission Board (JAB) of IITs is toying with the idea of having subjective questions in sections of the JEE (Advanced) paper. The idea is to test students on the understanding of the subject and reduce the element of 'guess work' by students, said a professor. The current format of the paper has only multiple choice questions (MCQs).

"Many students who clear JEE (A) do so by a stroke of luck. Students often arrive at the right answer by eliminating the wrong ones. These students are usually not strong with concepts. It is difficult to test their understanding with an MCQ format question paper," said a professor. The IITs were considering a similar format in 2013.