Design institutes plan CAT-like entrance exam

The 'National Entrance Exam for Design' (NEED) test will be conducted by NID in collaboration with other top design schools in the country.

For students interested in taking up design studies, the labourious process of having to travel to individual design institutes for writing entrance tests in the absence of a common entrance test platform may soon come to an end.

For the first time, Ahmedabad-based National Institute of Design (NID), which has been ranked among the top 20 design institutions in the world by Business Week magazine, is planning to introduce a national entrance test on the lines of the Common Admission Test (CAT) conducted by management schools.

To be named the 'National Entrance Exam for Design' (NEED), the test will be conducted by NID in collaboration with 4-5 other top design schools in the country. The modalities for the test would be discussed in the upcoming NID's governing council meet in the second week of December.

"The NEED will be discussed at the governing council meet this month and is likely to be implemented in the end of 2008 for the incoming batch of June 2009," Dr Darlie O Koshy, executive director, NID told Business Standard.

NID alone receives around 5,000-6,000 applications each year for its undergraduate and post graduate programmes at the institute. Its collaborators for the entrance test are most likely to be member institutes of the Indian Design Institute's Alliance (IDIA). As of now, the institute is mulling introduction of the test only for the undergraduate programmes, and it could be extended to the post graduate programmes at a later stage.

Moving a step ahead of CAT, Koshy said that the institute is also exploring the option of offering the entrance test online for the benefit of students applying from across the country. While the CAT group is believed to have mulled offering CAT online as well as in regional languages in the past for management students, no concrete step has been taken so far in this direction.

NID and other design institutes have been thinking of a common entrance test platform since the last few years where they had spoken of a Design Aptitude Test (DAT) where students would be tested on creativity, material manipulation, visualisation and story telling, among others. The need for a common platform began to be discussed seriously last year after the number of students applying for design studies saw a jump of around 30 per cent.