A case to use JEE-Main instead of JEE-Advanced this year
#GS2 #Education
It would not only reduce stress for applicants, but also enable college admissions to the IITs to take place earlier
- College admissions, a stressful process even in normal circumstances, will be affected everywhere.
- National entrance examinations like the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)-Main, JEE-Advanced and National Eligibility cum Entrance Test have not yet been held.
- The JEE-Advanced exam is the sole prerequisite for admission into the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
- Students spend two years or more being coached for entrance examinations.
Two advantages
- The IITs for admitting B.Tech students this year is that they use the JEE-Main to admit students and cancel the JEE-Advanced in the light of the pandemic.
- This would not only reduce stress for a large number of applicants as they would not be required to write one more high-pressure exam, but would also enable college admissions to the IITs and other institutions to take place 6-7 weeks earlier.
- Since the IITs are among the most sought-after institutions in the country, admissions to the next level of institutions — the National Institutes of Technology (NITs), Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) and others — effectively happen only after the IIT list is published.
Impacting schedules
- Statistics on the fraction of students with a big rank difference will help us understand the impact of writing the JEE-Main in the place of the JEE-Advanced.
- To be clear, IIIT-Hyderabad admits about 50% of its undergraduates through the JEE-Main and the rest through other means.
- Our admissions calendar is very closely aligned to the IITs/The Joint Seat Allocation Authority by necessity.
- Let us reduce the pain of those aspiring to go to these colleges by reducing one entrance exam they have to write and by enabling admissions much earlier.