IIT Kanpur backtracks, to take part in JEE 2013

A meeting of IIT Kanpur’s senate decided on Saturday 28th July that it will not conduct its own entrance examination in 2013 and will take part in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). 
    It was decided that the joint admission board’s (JAB) recommendations arrived at and adopted by the IIT Council be accepted as an interim measure for JEE-2013, keeping in view the need to remove any uncertainty in the minds of students. 
    The controversy of whether to conduct its own entrance examination in 2013 instead of participating in the JEE, or accepting the recommendations arrived at in the JAB meeting held on June 23 and adopted by the IIT Council on June 27 has been settled. The undergraduate admission committee, which was formed to conduct the entrance exam, was dissolved, a release issued by the institute said. 
    It means that the IIT-K senate has accepted the compromise formula, which includes a proposal to take the top 20-30 students based on percentile ranking of respective boards for preparing the merit list. 
    This formula had been worked out when the directors of all the IITs had met during the JAB meeting in Delhi on June 23. The percentile formula, replacing the proposed format of giving weightage to board results, has also been accepted during the meeting.

BITS Pilani student gets a whopping Rs 59 Lakh offer,another gets Rs 42 lakh offer

Reportedly this year BITS pilani is also seeing some great placements this year, with heavy pay packets being offered to the students including am offer of Rs 59 Lakh to a student and Rs 42 Lakh to another.

Redmont International Ltd has reportedly offered a whopping package of Rs 58.5 Lakh per annum to a seventh semester student at BITS pilani while EPIC Solution, an IT company hired 3 students with Rs 42 Lakh package to one and Rs 39 Lakh to three students.Not just that Schlumberger, an oil and gas technology company has hired 18 students with an annual offer of Rs 18 Lakh.

Reportedly 100 students at the institute were offered a package of Rs 10 Lakh.

NPTEL now offers 1200 Engineering courses by IIT Professors, now you can learn from IITs without joining IITs

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)— an initiative by IITs and ministry of human resource development is reportedly readying a set of 1,200 engineering courses by the end of this year.

NPTEL currently offers 450 courses based on national engineering curriculum, which helps students learn engineering subjects from various IIT’s Professors, of which 250 are free youtube video lectures of subjects ranging from electronics, mechanical, aerospace to civil engineering.

The traction on NPTEL has reportedly increased three folds in the last two years from 11 million unique users per month to 33 million unique users per month.NPTEL has reportedly tiedup with various IITs and Gujarat University to develop the content for these courses

Study Smart with ETOOSINDIA

Etoosindia is an endeavour to ease the pressure on students by cutting down on travelling time and leaving them with more time to balance between school studies and JEE exam. In addition students also get enough quality time to pursue activities that lead to overall personality development. With etoosindia’s SMART learning options students get access to JEE lectures, classnotes, study material right in their home and that too from the Top faculties of Kota.

Except IIT-B and IIT-D, other Institutes fared poorly in QS Asian university rankings 2012, no IIT in top10

Reportedly all the universities in the country have fared poorly in the QS Asian University rankings for 2012, except IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi whose rankings have improved compared to last year.

Reportedly while IIT Bombay is up from 38 in 2011 to 34 in 2012 and IIT Delhi is up from 37 to 36 this year and apparently there is no IIT in top 10 in Asian rankings this year. Except IIT-B and IIT-D all other IITs ranks have dropped this year, IIT Kanpur climbed down the most by 11 places from 36 to 47 and IIT Kharagpur from 48 to 56, IIT Madras dropped from 43 to 45 and IIT Guwahati from 82 to 89.

“It is not that Indian universities and IIT’s are not doing well that the rankings are poor, but the rankings take into consideration many other factors such as International faculty, International students and Medicine , in which our universities loose most marks” said a senior academician talking about the same.

Students scoring zero in entrance exam get admission in Engineering with reservation

Reportedly, in Andhra Pradesh students handed over blank papers in exam but they have still qualified for admission into professional degree courses. Twenty-two of 78 students who scored zero in the entrance test EAMCET this year, but they will get admission in engineering and agriculture courses as they belong to Scheduled Caste (SC) or Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities. Nine students will get admission into engineering colleges, 13 can pursue other courses except MBBS.

According to officials in the education department, despite scoring zero in EAMCET (Engineering, Agriculture and Medical Common Entrance Test), these students have qualified as they got the minimum 40 percent marks in the qualifying XII exam.

The SC/ST students who qualified despite scoring zero in the medical stream in EAMCET can get admissions into agriculture, veterinary and horticulture courses.
The Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU), Hyderabad, conducts EAMCET every year for admission into engineering, medical, dental and agriculture courses both in government and private colleges in the state. The results of EAMCET 2012 were announced last week.

JEE Advanced Most Probably Going To Be A Subjective Exam, Final Decision On Format In August

On June 27, IIT Council meeting, IIT council agreed on a compromised formula for admission to IIT. As per this formula now there will be a two-tier process for admission ton IITs, JEE Main + JEE Advanced, with an eligibility criteria of top 20 percentile in XII board. In this meeting the format of JEE Main and JEE Advanced was not discussed.
Most probably JEE Main format will be same as AIEEE. IITs will decide the format of JEE Advanced, IITs want to go back to the subjective format of testing for JEE, instead of the current multiple-choice questions (MCQ) system.

A senior faculty member from IIT-Bombay told – “The senates of all the IITs were in favour of a subjective format test. Our initial demand was to have a rigorous test only for the top 50,000 students.” But now number of students has been increased to 1.5 lakh, a subjective test will need professors to evaluate the answers manually. Since 1.5 lakh is a huge number, we will have to discuss the matter in the senate, he added.

“All details of JEE-Advanced will be discussed in Joint Admission Board meeting in August,” IIT-B director Devang Khakhar said.

Another faculty member said a subjective test could ensure better quality of students to the premier engineering institutes. “It will answer the raging debate about the drop in the quality of IITians. Most of the times, in MCQ format, students get the right answer by smartly eliminating the wrong choices. Students should be able to solve the questions on a standalone basis. Only then they could be judged on their performances. But we will have to look at the logistics to conduct the subjective test for numbers as big as 1.5 lakh.”

With New JEE No. Of Girls In IIT Might Increase, Up To 25% Of Total Intake

The new JEE has made only top 20 percentile students in their school board examinations eligible for the JEE Advanced examinations, and since girls constitute a majority scoring high in school boards, IIT’s are expecting an increase in the number of girls making it to the premier colleges of engineering in the coming academic year, and they are also expecting a better mix of incoming students from outside of coaching centers.

“We see that a lot of the toppers in the board exams are girls. Right now the composition of girls on our campus is 14%. With this move, we expect the percentage to go up at least to 25%” Says R Nagarajan, professor of chemical engineering, IIT Madras.

Not only the increased percentage of girls in IIT’s , but IIT faculty are expecting a better quality and sincere students to join he IITs this year, ”This will ensure that the students are more sincere and that we will get students with better quality. We expect an attitudinal change among students, because they would have been going to school and taking the Class 12 exams seriously,” said professor Sarit Kumar Das of mechanical department, IIT Madras, talking about the same.

NITs decide to give 40% weightage to board exams

With the ‘one nation, one test’ proposal still a distant dream, the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) on Wednesday resolved to give 40% weightage to class XII board results for entrance to their undergraduate programme from the next academic session. Aspirants for the central engineering institutes will appear for one exam that will have 60% weightage. 
    Students seeking admission to these institutes would not have to appear for the advance test as had been proposed earlier. 
    “The formula worked out is very simple...40% weightage to board results and 60% to the mains,” R A Malshekar, chairman of the standing committee of NITs, said after a meeting chaired by HRD minister Kapil Sibal. He said the 40% weightage to the board results will be given after the process of normalization of marks of the state board. A committee, including NIT directors, CBSE chairman and other experts, will look into the issues relating to normalization of class XII Board marks on percentile basis. 
    Officials said the committee would look into validation of the formulae proposed for normalization of marks with the respective board results. The meeting was held just a week after the IITs decided that they will conduct their own test for admission to undergraduate programmes using the board exams only as a cut-off.