IIT-K students too oppose CET

Kanpur: After the academic senate of IIT-Kanpur disapproved the proposed single examination for engineering courses from 2013, the student senate of the same institute has also expressed dissatisfaction and rendered its full support to their faculty members.



The students of IIT-Kanpur through their student senate have turned down the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) and IIT council's decision of implementing the Common Entrance Test ( CET) for all IITs, NITs and IIITs from 2013 instead of conducting Joint Entrance Exam (JEE).



TOI has a copy of the letter written by the acting convener of the student senate to Chairman, Senate, Prof S G Dhande, who is also the Director of IIT-Kanpur, raising strong objection on the proposed implementation of single examination for engineering courses in the country. The students of the prestigious institute have said that the proposed examination is full of flaws from both academic and social point of view.



The student senate had written to Chairman, Senate Prof S G Dhande on June 7 demanding that their viewpoint about the proposed selection process for IITs be considered during the Friday's (June 8) meeting of the academic senate. The students were of an opinion that the changes in "the selection process are bound to increase stress on students, make admission system extremely fragile, corruptible and luck-based, further aggravating the very problems these changes seek to address".



The latter written to Prof Dhande further read that although a large number of exams increase the stress on students, taking the other extreme of just a single exam is even worse.



It also read that clubbing all exams into one would simply increase the pressure of performance on the students to a great extent and would make the future of the millions of engineering aspirants of the country dependent on one single day.



The students of IIT-Kanpur have also discarded the MHRD and IIT Council's proposal of giving weightage to the board examination.



The students further opined that the weightage being given to the board examination raises the immediate question of the differing levels of fairness, uniformity of standards and transparency among the examinations of the 42 different boards of the country.



"We strongly believe that no amount of normalization whatsoever can completely eliminate the problems of inconsistency, opacity, unfairness and subjectivity in the board exams," opined the student senate of IIT-Kanpur.One of the students, willing not to be named, said that as the exact details of the new system are still to be finalized, these students shall be denied full knowledge of the selection procedure for a considerable amount of time even now.



Thus, introducing this system in 2013 would only result in a marked failure and inevitable stress on the students appearing in 2013 due to "contingent uncertainties".



The recipients of the prestigious President's Gold Medal, Director's Gold Medal, Ratan Swarup Memorial Prize have raised objection on the changes in the JEE pattern from the year 2013.



These meritorious students in one voice had said that they do not want that the government should interfere in the way the IITs conduct the JEE. They said that JEE is a foolproof system to ascertain the calibre of the student and it is through this screening process that the sharpest of the brains reach IITs. They had also said that if any change in the exam pattern is done especially taking into consideration the student's performance in class XII, the standard of JEE and the IITs will fall.



Shubhayu Chatterjee, Ankit Kumar and Ashish Gupta, all receipients of the President's Gold Medal, Tej Pratap winner of Director's Gold Medal, Abhinav Prateek, winner of Ratan Swarup Memorial Prize and Parnika Agrawal, recipient of General Proficiency Award and Batra Gold Medal had one opinion in common that the new pattern of JEE to be introduced in 2013 is not the right move of the MHRD. The students had said that the faculty members of IITs have been successfully conducting JEE for past so many years and there was no ideal base to wind off this system. The students also opined that due to existence of different boards in the country, measuring the performance of the students based on their class XII results, is not possible on the basis of an statistical formula as it has been devised. Therefore, the JEE should be conducted the way it is being held across the country for years now.



Source:toi