A new IIT Council meeting is scheduled on August 21, 2018, in which the council members will discuss the new idea about revamping the IIT education. The members will discuss about dis-mantling the JEE Advanced exam and doing away with the flagship B.Tech courses and converting these premier institutes into high-end institutes which will offer PG education to nearly 80,000 students as opposed to offering UG courses to only 10,000 students.
The idea was sparked in some top level IIT Faculty. ‘Revamping Engineering Education and Returning Childhood to Studentsʼ is also aimed at check the multi-million dollar coaching industry and making the IIT-level teaching available to more students of the nation.
Sources at the HRD ministry said that the idea is up for the discussion and its feasibility from the implementation point of view remains to be seen.
As of now, the proposal suggests that JEE Mains exam should be used to classify all the candidates into 10 groups. These groups will be divided on the basis of marks range and the students in one group will be treated as equal. While JEE Advanced is proposed to be scrapped, premier institutes can still admit the students from the top most range without any further tests or interviews.
The proposal suggest that IITs forgo their B.Tech degrees and instead provide one semester experience to the 8 times the number of current candidates they accept for the B.Tech courses. Admission to this semester long experience will be done in 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th semesters of the B Tech program. The selection criteria for this is not specified/proposed yet.
These selected students may charged upto INR 2 lakh for the IIT experience. Banks can provide the loans to the students and in special cases they can also provide collateral free loan.
Students who will spend a semester at IITs will get their degrees from the universities which will explicitly mention the fact ‘IIT semester experience’.