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T
Ramaswamy Committee Report on Alternate Admission System for engineering
programme.
Anil
Kakodkar committee report on IIT autonomy measures
52%
IIT entrants qualified by
self-study : report
By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI : Fifty-two per cent of students who qualified IIT's
advanced entrance exam (JEE Advanced) this year were self-taught and
took no coaching, says an analysis done by IIT (Guwahati).
The analysis said that 5,539 students (52.4%) out of the 10,576 who
got admission to IITs had studied on their own. Those who went to
coaching centres comprised 44.5% (4,711) of successful candidates. The
remaining 2% either took individual tuitions or did correspondence
courses.
According to the IIT (Guwahati), the nodal
institute that conducted the Advanced JEE this year in collaboration
with the CBSE the IITs are still urban-centric with 75% of successful
students coming from cities and the rest from rural areas. This is also
indicated by the occupation of the parents.
Of the 36,566 who qualified for admission into IITs, NITs, IIITs and
other government-funded technical institutions, parents of 10,200 are in
government service followed by 5,814 in business, 4,097 in private jobs,
3,213 in agriculture, 2,018 in public sector, 1,700 in teaching or
research.
Parents of 327 students practised law, 59 are in the pharmacy sector
and only 21 are architects.
Rajasthan known for its IIT coaching centres in Kota has contributed
the maximum -- 1646 students -- this year. An IIT director pointed out
that Tamil Nadu which once contributed a lot to IITs is surprisingly not
among the top 12 states.
Students going to CBSE-affiliated schools have done the best
(5,849).
IIT-Guwahati also did an analysis of educational qualification of
parents whose children qualified for joint counselling to IITs, NITs,
IIITs and other government-funded technical institutes. A little over
1,000 were illiterate, 5,090 matriculate, 14,619 graduate and 8,893
postgraduates. Educational data of over 5,000 parents was not available.
Analysis also shows that parental annual income of 6,929 successful
students was up to Rs 1 lakh.
IIT-Kharagpur study
A similar but more exhaustive analysis
conducted by IIT-Kharagpur, the nodal organisation for JEE-2014, that an
overwhelming 63 per cent students who cleared JEE (advanced) did
it without joining coaching institutes.
A report by the IIT Kharagpur, which conducted JEE-Advanced
2014,
revealed that more than 50 per cent of IIT aspirants from almost all the
zones cleared the tests by preparing on their own.
Out of 1,582 students who cleared the test from the Guwahati zone of the
IITs, 998 (63.08 per cent) did so by going solus, or self preparation.
Among the 6,528 students qualified from the Bombay zone, 3,509 (53.75
per cent) shunned the “other mode” of preparation, which apparently
included attending classes in coaching institutes.
Similarly, 2,568 (56.05 per cent) out of 4,582 who cleared the test from
the Delhi zone did it all by themselves, as did 1,865 (60.14 per cent)
out of 3,101 in Kharagpur zone and 1,469 (56.35 per cent) out of 2,607
in Roorkee zone.
The Madras zone remained an exception to this trend, with a mere 2,152
(37.57 per cent) out of 5,728 successful students telling the IITs that
they had chosen the “other modes” over self preparation.
The statistics showed students from the Central Board of Secondary
Education (CBSE) virtually dominated the tests, with 14,955 (55.08 per
cent) successful students out of 27,152 belonging to CBSE affiliated
schools.
It also revealed that the number of girls qualifying to pursue technical
courses at the premier institutions remained low this year with just
11.08 per cent success rate.
Similarly, a mere 9.77 per cent students from the rural areas succeeded
in the tests. At 2,654, their numbers were dwarfed by the massive 24,498
from the urban centres.
IIT-Kharagpur was the convenor of the test in which over 1.19 lakh
candidates appeared.
South dominates
The report showed that the number of students from the southern states
qualifying for admission to the IITs had increased in the previous one year
compared to their northern counterparts, with the exception of Bihar,
Maharashtra and Gujarat.
A comparative analysis of the data indicates that the number of
students from Karnataka who qualified in the nation-wide test was almost
double (47.95 per cent) in 2014, compared to 2013. Kerala saw an
increase of 61 per cent.
As many as 506 students from Karnataka qualified in JEE-Advance in 2014
as against 342 last year. From Kerala, a total of 475 candidates figured
in the merit list this year against 295 last year.
Andhra Pradesh, from where the highest number of candidates (4,975)
qualified this year, witnessed an increase in the number of students
making it to the all-India merit list by 34.53 per cent. In 2013, a
total of 3,698 students had qualified from the state.
Tamil Nadu too witnessed an increase in the number of students
qualifying this year. As many as 603 students from the state figured in
the list of successful candidates, against 450 in 2013.
The IITs admitted 9,784 students, out of a total 27,152 candidates who
figured in the all India merit list, after three rounds of counselling.
In its report, however, IIT Kharagpur, the convener of JEE-Advance this
year, did not give state-wise statistics on the number of students
admitted to the 16 premier technical institutes.
According to the report, Bihar was second among states in terms of
increase in the number of students qualifying in 2014. The state, from
where 1,509 students qualified in JEE Advance in 2013, saw 50 per cent
increase in the successful candidates this year with 1,735 students
making it to the merit list.
The IIT report also indicated a significant increase in the number of
students qualifying from Gujarat and Maharashtra in 2014. As many as
672 students qualified from Gujarat against 450 the previous year, an increase
of 59.61 per cent. From Maharashtra, 2,313 qualified against 1,557 last
year - a 48.55 per cent jump.
From Rajasthan, 4,292 students qualified in 2014. The percentage
increase in the number of successful students, however, remained at
18.20 per cent.
In 2013, the state saw 3,631 students making it to the all India merit
list.
JEE-Advanced, 2014, was conducted under seven zonal IITs in 364 centres
in 98 cities across the country, besides one centre in Dubai, on May 25.
Over 1.19 lakh candidates took the test.
“There has been a significant increase in the number of candidates who
qualified in JEE Advanced, 2014. This increase is from 20,834 in 2013 to
27,152 in 2014,” the report said.
For
details go to their respective websites: IIT, Bombay
IIT, Delhi
IIT, Kanpur
IIT,
Kharagpur
IIT, Madras
IIT, Guwahati.
IIT, Roorkee
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IITs
forced to lower cut-off for UG admissions |
By Rajiv Shukla
NEW DELHI : Crumbling under government pressure, the Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs) lowered their cut-off marks on June 14
to admit 13, 542 more undergraduate students.
The revision of cut-off marks was made by
the IITs' Joint Admission Board (JAB) after declaration of results on
Sunday -- first time since 2013 when Joint Entrance Examination Advanced
was introduced. The revision of cut-off marks will swell the JAB merit
list from 18,138 candidates to
31,680.
This was done to address fears that many of the 12,079 seats on
offer would remain vacant because the size of the merit list after the
initial cut-offs was too small. According to Shalabh S, JEE chairman of
IIT-Kanpur, “The ministry’s directive was that there ought to be twice
the number of candidates in each category as the seats available.”
When asked R Subrahmanyam, Secretary,
Higher Education, MHRD confirmed that the government had to intervene as
"otherwise over 1,000 seats would have remained vacant." The government
prefers to have a substantial number of extra candidates on the merit
list, he explained.
HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar, later
tweeted that "responding to requests from students and IIT community &
to proactively ensure that all reservation seats are duly filled..." he
had asked the institutes "to make available candidates... twice the
number of seats in each category".
The JAB met on Wednesday, June 13
and deferred decision on lowering the cut-offs, triggering the Human
Resource Development Ministry to intervene in the evening and ask the
IITs to relax the cut-offs.
The IITs have a pre-determined cut-off of 35 per cent aggregate
marks for general category candidates, followed by 31.5 per cent for the
Other Backward Classes and 17.5 per cent for the Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes.
Apart from this, the general candidates need to obtain 10 per cent
marks in each of the individual papers - mathematics, physics and
chemistry - while the OBCs need nine per cent and the Dalit and tribal
candidates five per cent.
This year, the 23 IITs are offering 12,079 BTech seats, which
include 800 supernumerary seats reserved for girls. Twenty-seven per
cent seats are reserved for the OBCs, 15 per cent for the Scheduled
Castes and 7.5 per cent for the Scheduled Tribes.
Each category has a sub-quota of 5% for disabled ones.
Of the seats on offer, 3,261 will go to the OBCs, but the number of
OBC candidates on the first merit list was 3,140. Candidates who crack
the JEE Advanced are eligible for admission to other top institutions
too, like the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Indian
Institutes of Science Education and Research.
IIT
Council approves massive seat hike
By Rajiv Shukla
NEW DELHI : Blissfully unmindful of the paucity of faculty and
infrastructure in the new Indian Institutes of Technology, Human
Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar pushed through his seat
hike agenda at the 50th IIT Council meeting here on August 23,
2016.
The Council, which met under the chairmanship of the minister, decided
to add 10,000 seats per year until 2020. This will be done by adding
4,000 seats in undergraduate courses and 6,000 in postgraduate and Ph.D
courses per annum. The yawning problem of limited hostel accommodation
will be solved by allowing students to stay outside the campus in rented
accommodations, particularly those seeking admissions in PG and Ph.D
courses. At present the IITs admit 10,500 UG students, 8,000 PG students
and 3,000 Ph.D students.
The second important decision is to boost research -- and for this even
B.Tech passouts will be allowed to do a Ph.D, deviating from the
conventional practice of permitting only postgraduates to do doctorate
programmes. Besides, a prime minister’s fellowship of Rs 60,000 a month
for five years will be given to around 1,000 students to do research in
IITs.
At present, students pursuing M.Tech and Ph.D in IITs after clearing the
Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) also get scholarship which
will continue. An M.Tech student gets Rs 12,400 per month while a Ph.D
student gets Rs 25,000 per month for the first two years and Rs 28,000
monthly in the next three years under the existing GATE scholarship.
These scholarships will continue.
Another decision taken by the council is to introduce a IIT-BHU prepared
three-week induction course to allow students to adapt to their new
environment, take up courses on languages and creative arts, and bond
with classmates as well as faculty members. Classes will commence only
after the induction course.
The induction course, to begin with, will
be introduced in seven IITs — Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras,
Roorkee and Guwahati.
The IIT Council also approved a pilot run
of a national aptitude test, which will be voluntary in nature and will
not have a bearing on engineering admissions.
The worry
The seat hike decision is worrying the IIT directors, and one of them,
expressed angst saying "already the teacher-taught ratio in the IITs
works out to be abysmal 1:15 instead of the desired 1:10, what is going
to happen after the seat hike?" he asked.
When asked by the reporters, Javadekar brushed aside the query by saying
that the IITs would try to fill the posts by attracting Indians with
Ph.Ds working in foreign institutions.
When coaxed for an answer he said his ministry has already launched the
Global Initiative of Academic Network (GIAN) under which foreign faculty
are being invited to Indian campuses to take a few courses; 260 foreign
faculty have already visited in the last one year and another 800 would
come in the next one to two years, Javadekar said.
Scholarships
The council decided to start a Prime Minister's Fellowship to encourage
B.Tech students to pursue Ph.D. The B.Tech graduates from IITs with good
performance will be able to seek direct admission into Ph.D and get the
Prime Minister's Fellowship of Rs 60,000 per month for five years.
Aptitude Test
The government is planning to put in place an engineering aptitude test
that students of classes 11 and 12 can take up to assess their ability
to excel as engineers beforehand. Once the aptitude test comes into
force, all aspirants will have to take it. The successful students will
be able to take further engineering entrance tests. The council decided
the IITs should conduct a pilot aptitude test in the next one year after
which how to roll it out would be decided.
Cabinet
approves ISM as IIT Dhanbad
By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI : On May 25 the Union cabinet decided to award IIT status
to Indian School of Mines (ISM) fulfilling the promise made by Prime
Minister Narendra Modi before the general elections in 2014.
The Cabinet meeting chaired by the Prime Minister also gave ex-post
facto approval to six new IITs, two of which, IIT Palakkad and IIT
Tirupati, have already started functioning from last year.
The Cabinet also granted ex-post facto approval for
establishing an NIT in Andhra Pradesh.
The four new IITs will start functioning from this year in Dharwar
(Karnataka), Bhilai (Chhattisgarh), Goa and Jammu. They will offer 120
B.Tech seats each taking the total seats in 23 IITs to 10,500 this year
against 10,000 seats offered in 19 IITs last year.
In his budget speech last year, Union
finance minister Arun Jaitley had announced the new IITs and the
conversion of ISM to IIT. However, an expert panel, set up by the HRD
ministry, was opposed to the conversion, subject to fulfilling a series
of conditions.
The committee, headed by former IIT Bombay chairman Ashok Mishra, had
initially given an adverse report in view of deficiencies. But it was
again asked to suggest ways to upgrade the 90-year-old ISM.
In its second report, submitted last year, the panel highlighted several
lacunae, particularly in the standards of faculty, in many branches and
said that every faculty member at ISM should be evaluated by the same
yardstick as that of established IITs.
Faculty members falling short of the yardsticks should be sent to
institutions like IITs or IISc to be trained and younger faculty without
Ph.D should be asked to complete their thesis from IITs, IISc or any
reputed institutions abroad, the panel had said.
The committee said ISM was good for mining and petroleum
engineering, earth science etc. However, departments like computer
science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and chemical
engineering weren't at par with IITs in terms of quality of faculty,
research output, industry-linkage and international exposure.
HRD Ministry sources said that all the concerns of the panel would be
addressed in a time-bound manner.
The institute had appointed 50 faculty members between 2004 and 2008 who
were only M.Tech holders.
The decision to upgrade ISM has spelt both a bane and a boon for the
90-year-old institute. Chairperson D.D. Mishra said IIT status would
prevent the institute to open an off-campus in Visakhapatnam, despite
the Chandrababu Naidu government offering 300 acres of land for the
purpose.
"There are IITs in every state. One IIT cannot set up a campus in a
state which already has an IIT. ISM as a special type of institution
could have opened the off-campus," Mishra said.
IIT
dons create no interest for learning : study
MUMBAI : Most IIT Bombay professor have failed to infuse
interest for studies among the students, says a study published in the
students' magazine called Insight.
The study published in the April issue of the quarterly magazine (Vol
15 Issue 3) says that about 88 per cent IIT Bombay do
not study as their professors do not manage to generate interest in
their courses.
While a few teachers are enthusiastic about teaching, others are not,
reveals the survey published in the magazine. Fed up with criticism
about their “poor performance” compared to previous batches, a group of
IITians from the current batch had conducted a survey on the campus.
The first part of the survey focusing on why students don’t study at IIT-B,
published in the January issue, had revealed that if not put on a
deadline for an assignment, 75% students do not spend any time on
academics. While more than 75% IITians seem to be more interested in
pursuing hobbies, many are hooked on to social networking and micro-blogging
sites.
The second part of the survey, published in the April issue, focuses on
issues concerning the teaching and learning process in the institute. In
this report, students have included reactions from professors, and also
made a few observations.
At least 72 per cent students believe the course content is theoretical,
lacks in application and therefore, is not interesting. Many IITians
have sought a return to blackboard teaching as they believe that showing
slides does not ensure value-addition from the teachers.
The study says that teachers have cited large classes as one of the
reasons for “inefficient teaching”. “With a shortage of faculty, the
surge in number of students has not given enough time to the teachers
and for the infrastructure to evolve,” says the report.
Professors claim that they have to perform two jobs —teach and research.
“It is not hard to see why it is possible that research could be more
interesting and teaching could be relegated to being one of the
unpleasant aspects of the job for many professors,” says the report.
“Unfortunately, both teaching and research are fulltime jobs. Increased
focus on one would impact the other,” says a teacher in the report.
Also, 75 per cent of the students feel they can get a decent grade even
by studying a night before the exam, which reflects badly on the
standards of learning process.
Devang Khakhar, IIT-B director, says, “We are constantly working on
improving the teaching and learning standards. The senate committee has
proposed to set up a centre for effective teaching and learning. The
institute is also making efforts to build new lecture halls to reduce
the class size, and, thus increase interaction between teachers and
students.”
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