Zeenews Bureau
New Delhi: In view of stiff opposition to the proposed Common Entrance Test for admission in IITs and other centrally-funded technical institutes, the government is mulling a new formula to end the controversy.
Reports on Tuesday claimed that among the measures being considered, the government is mulling to allow screening based on class tenth results. Besides, the IITs and other centrally-funded technical institutes may also be allowed to conduct their own advance examination.
The development comes nearly a week after the IIT faculty federation, opposed to the proposed CET, met senior PMO officials and later the Prime Minister seeking a roll back of the decision.
The All India IIT Faculty Federation (AIIITFF) also wrote a letter to the Prime Minister on May 31 saying that "each IIT is an individual and independent academic entity and should reserve its right to follow its own norms with regards to admissions and other academic matter".
The government had on May 28 announced that from 2013, aspiring candidates for IITs and other central institutes like NITs and IIITs will have to sit under a new format of Common Entrance Test, which will also take the plus-two board results into consideration.
Sibal had claimed that it was approved without dissent at a council consisting of the IITs, the IIITs and the NITs. IIT Kanpur faculty opposed the council's decision of adopting the new test format.
Later in a statement, the AIIITFF demanded that since the new common entrance test was decided upon without proper consultation process, each IIT should now be given choices of accepting the proposed test as it is, accept it with specific conditions or riders or reject the proposed test and have own admission processes.
It reiterated that the any changes should be only from 2014 or later and the current test pattern such as JEE, AIEEE, other state entrance test should continue at least for the year 2013.
The federation insisted that board performance should be used as cut-off only instead of giving weightage to it after the process of normalisation as has been proposed under the new format.
The federation also contested the two-tier format for the common test, (appearing in both main and advance test)stating that only the main be used for all institutes except the IITs to select students.
It said the advance test should be required only for the IITs.
First Published: Tuesday, June 19, 2012, 12:17