Changes In IITJEE Pattern: Adding Pressure On Students

By Binayak Ghosh:

For thousands of students (including me) aspiring to become engineers, it’s a chaotic. With barely 8 months to go for the JEE, students are still in dark clouds regarding the new pattern of IIT JEE. The recent stories developing around the new pattern of joint entrance examination literally gives us nightmare, and it’s quite obvious when our future is at stake. Nowadays, most of our chats revolve around those developments. Today our facebook status revolves around this new pattern. Every morning I browse through newspapers just to find stories related to it. Well, it’s not just my story, every friend and other thousands of to-be-engineers have the same story to share.

IIT JEE is one of the crucial examinations in the lives many of students. In fact, it decides the future of students. Being one of the toughest exams, students leave no stone unturned to get into IITs. But this year, students are bewildered regarding the new pattern of JEE. We are suffering because of the tussle between the government and the IITs. The sudden changes in JEE pattern would affect us. It’s easy to implement changes on paper but it’s impossible for students to adapt themselves according to the new pattern in such a short period. Mr Kapil Sibal believes that new pattern would decrease the pressure on students. But unfortunately Mr. Sibal fails to understand that sudden change would affect students appearing for JEE in 2013.

We have been under rigorous training to crack JEE for last couple of years and all of a sudden you are changing the pattern. Is it fair Mr. Sibal? Mr. Sibal dreams to put an end to coaching and tutorial classes. But if he thinks that including board marks in JEE will eliminate the 40 billion industries then he must think again. Inclusion of board marks would, in fact, encourage coaching institutes. Moreover it also contradicts the aim of the change; it will add up more pressure on students.

As the present scenario is concerned, the syllabus of JEE and board syllabus differs a lot. So, just reading textbooks surely won’t work for the JEE. Coaching classes come to rescue. They guide students for the preparation of JEE syllabus along with other competitive examinations. Without coaching & tutorial classes, it’s very hard (though not impossible) to get into IIT. As a consequence, coaching industry has turned into a 4000crore business.

To make sure that coaching classes find their way to graveyards, it’s necessary to change the syllabus. Today, JEE papers lack the aptitude part. In fact, coaching institutes mostly focus on solving tougher problems mechanically, rather than building concepts. Adding an aptitude section would surely give a blow to the coaching classes.

I personally believe that the present system needs several changes to pick the best minds into the best institutes, but the changes should be incorporated gradually. Changing the pattern all of a sudden would create chaos among students and also add pressure on them. I hope that the crisis will soon end with a solution which would benefit the education system and gradually help students to stand up to their potential.