By Ashna Mishra:
The Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) has decided to conduct its own exam for admissions in 2013 rejecting Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal’s decision to hold a common entrance examination for the IITs and the NITs.
On May 28, 2012, IIT Council Head and HRD Minister Kapil Sibal announced a common entrance examination which would in turn replace the IIT-JEE and AIEEE, effective from 2013.
Further, as per this proposal XII board results will also matter in the selection criteria.
But now, IIT Kanpur has decided to slam Kapil Sibal’s proposal and IIT Delhi and IIT Mumbai are also expected to follow the same. The president of IIT-Delhi, Professor Sanjeev Sanghi said, “We fully support what IIT-Kanpur has done,”. Several aspiring candidates have already voiced their disapproval regarding the new pattern of CET citing the forthcoming rules as unfair.
This issue is increasingly generating confusion and conflict of views among the IIT senate as well as the aspiring students. Thinking of it as the reduction of burden on students, who have to give to give multiple exams, definitely seems to convince my brains and favour the CET proposal by Kapil Sibal. But, then I ask myself is this reason really all it takes to bring about such a change in format. And, my heart says, NO! We cannot afford to play with the educational system like this. And, of course we cannot afford to side-line the interests of the students at large like this.
Talking about this, I travel back in time to the previous year and can easily recall the days when my friends gave engineering entrance examinations. Many of my batch-mates who couldn’t score well in JEE did exceptionally well in AIEEE and thus, I’m inclined to believe that multiple entrance exams in turn give multiple chances to students to ensure a seat in the best possible college. However, the system of Common Entrance Test would curb these chances for the aspirants. This curbing of opportunities, as per me, goes strictly against human resource development and further making me go against HRD Minister Kapil Sibal’s “one nation, one test” proposal.
So, I absolutely agree that what is being termed as a common sentiment seems rather forced on the senates by the IIT Council and would in turn deteriorate the quality of IITs. The students who aspire to study in institutes like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but cannot afford going there look forward to the IITs as the last hope and the IITs have to compete with such international engineering institutes. However this act of government seems to be pulling them down and is not in the interests of the student. Education is something which ought to be in the very interests of students unlike here.
Coming to the inclusion of XII board marks in the selection procedure, it more or less convinces me as the students are not supposed to neglect the XII boards just for the sake of getting into IITs, but only till a certain point. The point till we focus on the CBSE or the ICSE board but as we step towards the state boards, my mind again goes and sticks against the proposal. This is unfair to the students from the state boards. Thus, I feel that the senates need to be given more autonomy.
In the end, all I would say is education is not and cannot be based on a single mechanism. Moreover, it is quite apparent that where on one hand the western countries demand more Indian students (subject to the quality and format of education here); on the other hand, our government seems to blindly follow the format of the West.