Producing Unqualified Engineers? Centre Wants To Make IIT Entrance Exams Easier To Fill Vacant Seats

Taking a step further from the current academic year when the government reduced the cut-off for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) - Advanced to fill up 1,000 possibly vacant seats in various Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the government is now looking at bringing down the difficulty level of the exam itself.

As per a report by The Economic Times, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) feels the that the difficulty of the JEE might be too high and wants the matter to be a key agenda at the next IIT Council Meeting that will be chaired by HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar.

Conducted by IIT-Kanpur, JEE-Advanced 2018 saw the number of qualifying students drop to 18,138 for a total of 11,279 seats.

The IIT Joint Admission Board (JAB), after a self assessment that showed that 1,000 seats could go vacant, met on 12 June to take stock of the situation. However, it has been reluctant to bring down the cut-off levels and deferred the decision till a detailed analysis is conducted.

The ministry responded to the JAB a day later (13 June) asking it to ensure that all reservation category seats to be filled and no vacant seats are left after counselling. The letter also asked that a candidate list with twice the number of students in each discipline be prepared on the basis of merit. The letter resulted in the JAB bringing down the cut-off criteria by 10 per cent, adding around 13,000 students to the merit list.