IITs to consider aggregate board marks

This is in addition to the top-20 percentile condition: Ashok Thakur

The eligibility conditions set for the selection of students into Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) would see a change as the council of IITs under the ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has decided to consider the marks secured in board examinations in Class XII as a criteria for admission.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the 48th meeting of the Council of IITs, Ashok Thakur, secretary, department of Higher Education, MHRD, said besides the present method of selecting students who are in the top-20 per centile in their XII class board exams for admission in the IITs, the meeting has decided to give another provision for the students based on the marks secured in the board exams.

With this, students who have score more than 75 per cent in the board exam could also go for IIT counselling, said sources. For students in SC, ST, and differently-abled category this is 70 per cent, in addition to passing the JEE.

Meanwhile, MHRD expects to complete the formulation of an India-specific ranking system for higher education institutions in the country and communicate it with the international ranking agencies by the end of this year, said a senior official from the ministry.

The official said India will have its own ranking for any universities in the country. The ranking parameters used by the global agencies often go against the Indian universities and this is one of the primary reasons why Indian higher educational institutions have not been able to get higher ranking in these surveys.

According to an earlier report by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), none of the Indian institutes had figured in the top 200 universities in the world, raising serious concerns about the Indian education sector. The ministry will be finalising the ranking concerns with firms such as QS, Times Higher education among others, according to sources close to the development.

The Council meeting, which was chaired by HRD minister Smriti Irani, and representatives from around 16 IITs, was held in Chennai today.

The agenda of the meet also included ratification of renewal of contract of appointment of the directors of IIT-Bombay, IIT-Hyderabad and IIT-Gandhinagar. The schedule also had other topics such as elevation of Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, into an IIT, Ashok Misra Committee Report, student eligibility for receiving scholarships for the newly-started MSc-PhD integrated programmes.