IIT's to change pattern of IIT JEE

The Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) are all set to bring about a whole new change in the pattern of the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) being organised every year across the country. The changed exam pattern may be put into practice from the year 2013 but a final conclusion will be reached only at the IIT council meeting scheduled to be held in the first week of January.

"The IIT council has accepted the recommendations of Dr T Ramaswamy committee but how will the suggestions made be put into implementation is yet to be deliberated upon. It will be only in the first week of January next year that any concrete decision in this regard would be taken," IIT-K director SG Dhande informed media persons.

Prof Dhande said according to the recommendations of Ramaswamy committee, the new pattern of JEE would include conducting an aptitude test for exam aspirants. The students will have to crack this aptitude test consisting of questions based on reasoning and all other subjects that the students have studied in their schools.

Dhande said instead of calculating the performance of the students on the basis of the percentages received in their Class XII, the weightage would be given to the percentile. For this, the percentages achieved by the students in their Class XII would be converted into percentile by using a specific formula.

"As different states have different state boards and there are only two central boards viz CBSE and ICSE, it will be a difficult task to establish uniformity in the percentages achieved by an individual student when comparing his performance with the other individuals. For this the percentage of marks achieved by the students would be converted into a percentile. This would be done through virtual mapping by the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata," said Dhande while explaining about the proposed way via which the percentages achieved by the students in Class XII in their different state boards would be brought on a uniform scale.

He further said the 50% weightage would be given to this percentile performance and other 50% weightage would be given to the performance in the JEE. It would be on the basis of these two performances the students rank in the JEE would be accessed.

Dhande also added that there were 42 state boards and because of that reason, some kind of uniformity had to be established to match the performance of the individual students (in Class XII) with one another.

"And when so many boards are there and each one of them has its importance, the percentile match is the only way out to calculate the students performance," he further said.