Changes to JEE: IIT Kanpur Students' Opinion

Changes to JEE: IIT Kanpur Students’ Opinion

Recently, I had requested the IIT K students to send me their views regarding the recently announced changes, and based on the replies, I compiled this standpoint, which was further accepted by the IIT K Students' Senate.


The Students of IIT Kanpur strongly condemn the recently announced changes to the
selection procedure of the IITs and vehemently support the stand of IIT Kanpur Faculty
Forum on the same. The proposed single examination for engineering admission is
counterproductive and full of flaws from both an academic, and a social viewpoint. These
changes are bound to increase the stress on students, make the admission system
extremely fragile, corruptible, and luck-based, further aggravating the very problems
these changes seek to address.

Although a large number of exams increase the stress on students, taking the other extreme of
just a single exam is even worse. Having at least two or three alternative exams on different
days with different formats somewhat cushions the weight. Clubbing all exams into one exam
would simply increase the pressure of performance on the students to a great extent and
would make the future of the millions of engineering aspirants of the country dependent on one
single day. This can only accentuate instead of relieving the stress level of the students.
The huge weightage being given to the Board examination raises the immediate question of the
differing levels of fairness, uniformity of standards and transparency among the examinations
of the 42 different boards of the country. While, the proposed normalization of Board Marks
remains untested, we strongly believe that no amount of normalization whatsoever can
completely eliminate the problems of inconsistency, opacity, unfairness, and subjectivity in
the Board exams.

The major contributor to the decline of importance of school education is the below par quality
of education being imparted in the schools, mainly owing to the lack of quality teachers and
availability of necessary resources at higher secondary level in a large number of schools
across the country. Thus, the need of the hour is to raise the quality of education. Attributing
failure of the schooling system to engineering admission tests and the bringing changes to
them without improving the resources fails to address the serious concerns regarding quality of
school education.

A more immediate problem concerns the students slated to appear for Engineering entrance
exams in 2013. Since the exact details of the new system are still far from being finalised,
these students shall be denied the full knowledge of the selection procedure for a considerable
amount of time even now. Thus introducing this system in 2013 can only result in a
marked failure and inevitable stress on the students appearing in 2013 due to contingent
uncertainties.

Further, any decision of such magnitude warrants proper deliberation and consultation with
the actual recipients of the changes, i.e. the IIT fraternity, both students and teachers,
which the concerned authorities have conveniently ignored in this particular matter. The
changes being brought against the wishes of the IIT Senates is an encroachment on the much
needed autonomy of the IIT Senates. Further the decision to affect these changes directly from 2013 instead of 2014, without proper consultation and against all academic advice, raises
several questions over the haste being shown to bring the changes.

Thus, concern for the engineering aspirants, strong desire to keep the admission procedure
fair as well as vehement support for maintaining the autonomy and sovereignty of IIT Senates,
leads the students of IIT Kanpur to express their strong disapproval of the proposed
system and its suggested implementation plan.