New format for admission to IITs, NITs, IIITs from 2013

The announcement was made today by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal after chairing a meeting of the joint councils of IITs, NITs and IIITs.

Emphasising that there was no "dissent" among the councils about the move, he acknowledged there "was a lot of resistance during the consultation process from the IIT system". IIT senates especially the faculty federation had been opposing the new format.

But Sibal said the selection of the candidates for the IITs and other central institutes would be different even as all the aspirants will have to go through all the steps under new format. This system will replace the IIT-JEE and AIEEE.

Students will sit for a main test and an advance test conducted on the same day.

For admission to all the centrally funded institutes, there would be 40 percentage weightage for performance in Class XII (after normalisation of marks), 30 per cent weightage to performance in main and 30 per cent in the advanced test.

In case of IITs, there would be a filtering process involved. The board results and the main test will be given 50 per cent weightage each. Only the top 50,000 students will be selected for the advance test after taking into account their performance in the board results and the main result.

"The merit only in advanced examination will be considered for admission" to the IITs, Sibal said.

At the same time, he added, the IIT council has agreed to move to the other system by 2015. (MORE)