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Latest News |
| 14th
July 2010 / Times of India / Mumbai Edition |
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Tech schools to normalise Class-XII marks
Mumbai: In case you thought that you’d have a headstart
in getting into the Indian Institutes of Technology if
you enrolled for class XII in a school board known for
leniency during evaluation, think again.
Although union HRD minister Kapil Sibal has mooted the
idea of a pan-India uniform science curriculum, the public
technical schools have decided to design a method of normalising
class-XII marks of all engineering aspirants and bring
them on par, suspecting that boards may jack up marks
to provide an undue advantage to their students.
The final report, ‘Alternative to IIT-JEE, AIEEE
and state JEEs’, will be submitted next week to
HRD minister Kapil Sibal and include a clause which states
that although, to begin with, 70% weightage will be assigned
to the class-XII marks, its importance could be scaled
up or down in future. “Moreover, we will be normalising
the marks in some fashion to bring students from the varied
boards on par,’’ said a member of the committee.
In February, the HRD ministry set up a committee headed
by IITKharagpur director Damodar Acharya and comprising
IIT-Madras director M S Ananth, IIT-Bombay director Devang
Khakhar and IIT-Roorkee head S C Saxena, to cut the multiple
entrance exams for engineering and alter the selection
process in such a manner that class-XII marks were factored
in.
After holding meetings with stakeholders across the country,
the IITs discussed the report internally on each of the
campuses to get inputs from their faculty members. “Every
day, we have been reading articles about how the Maharashtra
state board has inflated the scores of class-X students
as a superficial method to bring them on par with of students
from other boards.Hence, we felt that other boards would
resort to the same practice to give an added advantage
to their students,’’ said a faculty member
at IIT-B.
Teachers at most engineering college campuses felt that
the emphasis on school marks (70%) was too high. Even
in IIT-Delhi, some professors suggested that the raw class-XII
marks be converted to percentile to get rid of “evaluation
blips’’.
Engineering New Selection Formula
Conduct one exam — a National Aptitude Test —
which can capture parameters of interest such as raw intelligence,
aptitude, general awareness, comprehension and written
communication skills
A composite weighted performance score would then be drawn
up based on the marks in NAT, and those in science subjects
(physics, chemistry and maths) in Class-XII board exam
Top scorers to take an add-on test to join the IITs
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