New JEE entrance: This is a fight for Brand IIT

Chennai: The mounting resistance to HRD minister Kapil Sibal’s proposal for a new joint engineering entrance test retroactively justifies what his cabinet colleague Jairam Ramesh famously said some time back — that the reputation of IITs comes from the quality of their students and nothing else.

And the quality of the students is solely dependent on just the process of selection or what is commonly known as IIT-JEE.

That is precisely why the majority of the key stakeholders such as the IIT-alumni, top-ranked IITs such as Kanpur and Kharagpur and even the All India IIT Faculty Federation, besides the lobby of the multi-million dollar coaching class industry, are up in arms against any change in such a process.

IIT-JEE has emerged as the gold-standard in the selection process for engineering students in India and is widely accepted by the industry and academic institutions. IIT is a lifelong premium tag that a chosen few carry with them.

Amazingly, it is just a test that made all the difference and because there is so much riding on this test that any attempted change is seen as sacrilege.

The statement by the IIT-Kharagpur faculty, which outrightly rejected its director’s support to the new move summarises the huge premium on the test: “The trust that the IIT-JEE has earned over the last five decades is due to the continuous evolution of processes and unflinching devotion of the faculty and staff of the IITs. Any test leading to ranking in IIT admissions must be wholly owned by IITs.”

IIT Kanpur, which was the first to dismiss Sibal’s fancy plan, on Sunday even constituted its own admission committee which will devise its own entrance test for 2013. There were also indications that Mumbai and Delhi IITs will oppose the new format.

The resistance from the “old” IITs and faculty is not just a simple fight for supremacy, but arises from the concerns of a possible dilution of quality. At the heart of the concern is changing the criteria, at least partially, of eligibility by bringing in state board class XII marks.

They do have a point here. For years, the JEE stood out because one required superlative skills, both in terms of the complete knowledge of the subject matter and its application, to crack it. The questions are almost entirely conceptual and are never direct like in other routine exams. This calls for meticulous training, a lot of grit and enormous perseverance. That perhaps separated the wheat from the chaff.

Just because trained skills alone help the candidates deal with the complexity or difficulty of the questions, it doesn’t mean that they do not have a deeper understanding of the subjects. In fact, it is the other way around. Without a deeper understanding of the subjects, one will be unable to handle the questions. On top of that, one requires hard-skills acquired through practice.

By bringing in the 12th board exam marks as a 50 percent criterion for preliminary selection, the new test dilutes the premium on such hard skills. It’s not clear why HRD wants to tinker with a process that painstakingly handpicked the creme of India’s prospective technical talent.

There is nothing wrong with expanding its ambit so that other institutions also graduate to a more stringent selection processes, but changing the pattern? For what?

Besides the opposition to changing a working model based on an evolving process as highlighted by the IIT faculty federation, what outrages the opponents is the unreliable inconsistency of class XII marks across educational boards.

Playing nativity politics, many states in the country have been trying to promote their own board exams, as against the CBSE or ICSE. They are often accused of favouring the state board students when marks become the basis of selection of students for engineering or other professional courses.

For instance, in Tamil Nadu, CBSE students are at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to admission to the state-affiliated engineering colleges because it is based on board marks. In states such as Kerala, the admission gives equal weightage to the board marks and the score of a common entrance exam. Here again, national board students say that they are at a disadvantage because the state board marks are mostly higher and any equalisation process is far from perfect.

Then there are allegations of unfair practices or rather malpractices that some institutions or pockets engage in. The possibility of malpractices cannot be ruled out for a country as diverse as India. There cannot be uniform checks and balances when the syllabi, systems of examination, politics and the rule of law are different.

If Kapil Sibal brings such board marks generated from non-uniform methods, which are not protected from the risk of malpractices, into the selection process, he is also opening the JEE to the possibility of malpractices and students with dubious credentials. Unless he is sure of a fool-proof and nearly consistent board exam system, trying it out is fraught with risks that will adversely affect meritorious students and brand IIT.

By the way, what was the necessity for changing a working model? There hasn’t been a convincing argument from the HRD.

What Kapil Sibal should do well, instead, will be to stop indiscriminately accrediting engineering colleges and granting them deemed university status. A genuine audit of the basic elements of the AICTE accredited engineering colleges could be one of the first steps worth trying. But that will definitely be a bitterly bitter pill to take.

It’s always easier to appear progressive than being progressive.

Leave the IIT-JEE alone. Everybody likes it and it’s working.