No change in admission for IISc, IIT-D and IIT-B

Admissions to the undergraduate courses at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, as well as at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Delhi and Mumbai will continue to be on the basis of the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advance system, notwithstanding their recent elevation as Institutes of Eminence.

The IIT Council on Monday decided not to consider any further changes in the JEE (Advance) system separating the three from the rest of the top line of technical institutions, sources at the Union human resource development ministry said after a meeting of the council, held at IIT Delhi.

“To a large extent, IIT brand value depends on the careful selection of the students. JEE Advance is a fairly settled system. The council agreed not to tinker with it,” the sources said.

A change in the admission system was understood to be one of the proposals on the table before the IIT Council following the Centre's last month's decision to accord the Institute of Eminence (IoE) tag to six institutions including the two IITs and the IISc.

Others in the IoE list are BITS Pilani, Manipal Academy of Higher Education and Reliance Foundation's upcoming Jio Institute.

Also there will be no revision of tuition fee for undergraduate students.

The board of governors at each of the IITs has been given freedom to decide on the fee for foreign students who wish to join M Tech programme.

Currently the annual fee for such students is pegged at a uniform $ 8,000 (nearly Rs 5.58 lakh) across the IITs.

With poor standard of engineering education in many private colleges, the council has also asked each IIT to mentor at least 5 local engineering colleges.

“Most of them will be from the private sector,” said an official.

The mentoring would involve orientation and training of teachers in those private colleges, introduce those students to the IIT system and programmes like PAL (professor assisted learning) and encouraging the industry to have a look at the students passing out from those colleges.

IIT Madras is the only IIT that does mentoring at the moment.

“Besides IITs have also been asked to engage with high school teachers to up-skill them. At least five schools near an IIT should be brought in for the engagement,” Prakash Javadekar, Union Human Resource Development Minister, said.

To help senior high school students evade the coaching institutes that charge hefty fees, the IITs have prepared more than 600 online material including lectures, hand-on experiments, discussion forum and trial examinations.

“All of them would be put on the IIT PAL platform and made available to students free of cost,” the minister said.