Engineering Admissions 2020: IITs should use JEE Mains

In a normal year, this would have been the time when the 12th class board exams would have been over, JEE Mains would be over, and some students would be preparing for JEE Advanced for admission to IITs, which would have been held around 20th May. But this is anything but a normal year. The country had to be locked down. The exams had to be postponed, and we haven't even finished conducting 12th class exams, not to mention admission tests.

In the most optimistic scenario, JEE Mains is proposed to be conducted in the first week of June. To the author, this does not seem feasible. One can conduct a national level exam only when there are not many hot spots, and some limited travel to nearby cities is allowed. JEE Mains is taken by almost 10 lakh students, and you will find everyone being accompanied by 1-2 parents/elders. So we are talking about movement of 30 lakh people (including exam center persons, invigilators, etc.). I doubt if we would be in a position to allow that kind of movement anytime soon.

So, the next semester is unlikely to start in the last week of July. There will be delays. The question is how soon after the situation has improved can we start our colleges. Conducting JEE Advanced in the same format as every year will add five weeks extra to the delay. Since there is a joint counseling of a large number of engineering institutions, the admission to other institutes cannot happen before IITs are ready to do theirs. Even if we were to abandon the joint admission strategy, there is really no point in other institutions doing their admission early, since IITs are the most sought after engineering institutions in the country, and students will leave other institutions when they get admission to IITs, wasting a large number of seats in the next tier institutions.

There are two issues to be considered: Are the advantage of JEE Advanced to IITs so significant that they would go to the extent of imposing a 5-week delay on all other engineering colleges. And the second issue is whether this would be fair to students, and what all we need to do to ensure the maximal fairness in a bad situation.

First, let us take the issue of fairness to students. I am sure some of them (particularly those who would not do well in JEE Mains) would claim that they would have done better in JEE Advanced. They may even challenge the change of admission process in a court on the grounds that they have been working with a specific plan for two years or more, and it is unfair to change goalpost at a late stage. And indeed, some of that feeling would be genuine. Also, some people who took JEE Mains in January and got a good enough score to succeed for JEE Advanced may not have registered for JEE Mains in April. They may now want to take JEE Mains.

So we need to do multiple things. First, all students who had taken JEE Mains in January but did not register for April version should be now allowed to register for the same. To ensure that each one of them would have reasonable time to focus their preparation to the JEE Mains now, we should immediately announce that it won't be conducted in at least 6 weeks (or whatever duration) from the date of announcing change in admission policy. And finally, to mitigate the feeling that JEE advanced is a better predictor of talent, IITs should agree to have a much more liberal branch change policy for this batch. This would mean that even if you think you were good enough for a better rank in JEE Advanced, prove that by getting a better CGPA in the first year in the IIT of your choice.

From the perspective of IITs, there are two advantages of continuing with JEE Advanced. One is the fear of court cases. And second is a feeling of autonomy. One could also add a feeling of JEE advanced being a better exam in detecting talent, but I will dismiss that since IITs have never even cared to think what kind of students they would want to admit, they have never made their data public, or done research themselves in terms of any correlation between the performance in JEE and performance in IITs.

Considering how Supreme Court has been largely supportive of anything reasonably done by the Government, I think the courts would definitely consider Covid-19 as a very special circumstances in which some tough decisions needed to be taken in the interest of saving 5 weeks of several lakh students across the country. As far as the feeling of autonomy is concerned, I think that JEE Advanced is an important symbol of IIT autonomy, and it must be preserved. The fear would be that if this year IITs agree to admission through JEE Mains, they will be pressurized to accept students from JEE Mains every year. So, the government would have to give a very categorical assurance that they will not put pressure on IITs to disband JEE Advanced next year.

With this, it should be possible to admit students in IITs through JEE Mains this year.

While we are at it, let me also suggest how JEE Mains could be conducted as early as possible. As we discussed in the beginning, conducting JEE Mains means allowing 30 lakh people to travel over a period of one week. Now, if a lot of these people would have to travel a couple of hundred KMs, then one can conduct such an exam only after there is normalcy in pretty much all parts of the country. Managing permissions for lakhs of people to do inter-city travel if there are still restrictions would be a nightmare and not worth hurrying up the conduct of the exam. But if NTA can increase the number of test centers so that there is a center in most districts. This would mean that most candidates would have to do only an intra-district travel on the day of the exam. Such an exam can be conducted once we have virus spread under control in large parts of the country.

We need to take a quick decision, since it impacts conduct of JEE Mains also. If we don't decide within the next few days, then we would have by default decided to delay admissions in all engineering colleges by an additional 5 weeks.

Note: The main issue that I want to address is delay of 5 additional weeks. I would be happy if IITs can think of other ways to address this delay.