Meeting of IIT Chiefs in Hyderabad to Decide fate of JEE

In the third week of February a meeting consisting of all the directors of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) will take place in Hyderabad to decide the fate of JEE for admission in IITs and NITs in the country. The JEE has been planned to get replaced by a National level aptitude test by the centre, which will more be in the lines of SAT examination taken up in US.

If the new aptitude test model gets an approval through the meeting, the examination now can see a paper of English. The plan is to introduce the national aptitude test for JEE admissions from the academic session 2017-18. This step is believed to take down the number of qualified candidates to take up the JEE Advanced examination and filter good candidates from the heap.

Presently for the admission in prestigious engineering institutes like IITs and NITs, the candidates need to undergo JEE (Mains) and JEE (Advanced) examinations. The two stage examination is proposed by IITs to remain the same for IIT admissions but replacing the first state of the JEE (Mains) with National Aptitude Test. The second stage of selection would continue to be JEE (Advanced), as it is presently.

The IIT Directors are planning to include English as additional subject in the aptitude test as most of the students coming from non-English medium backgrounds face a lot of difficulties while going through the courses at IIT, due to the fact that the medium of instruction is in English. At the screening level they want to test the English language proficiency of the candidates to make life easier for them.