IITs may award marks to JEE admission seekers who adopt correct procedure while answering

The Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) may give marks to admission seekers who opts the correct procedure while answering a question even if the answer is incorrect from next year.

Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced is conducted every year for admission to BTech courses. The IITs sets multiple-choice questions where a candidate has to select one out of the four answer bubbles.

Two members of the IITs' Joint Admission Board (JAB), which discussed the matter, told The Telegraph that the question papers may have space for students to work the answers out instead of merely selecting a bubble. Most questions in the IIT Advanced involve equations.

"If a student has written the correct equation but not arrived at the right answer, he could still get some (as yet unspecified) marks," a JAB member said.

While the other member said that this move will help minimise the influence of private coaching institutes, many of which train students to eliminate the wrong options rather than work out the right answer.

"Because of such training, the IITs are getting students who lack critical analytical skills," he said.

An IIT Bombay teacher explained the limitations of the current practice of evaluating students only on the basis of the correctness of their answers. "It leads to a student who selected the right bubble through guesswork receiving the same marks as another who spent 10 minutes solving the problem," he said.

The entrance examination for the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will gocompletely online from 2018 to make logistics and evaluations easier, the Joint Admission Board (JAB) decided. The JAB, which is the policy-making body on IIT admissions, took the decision at a meeting.

In the online mode, students will take up the examination at designated centres where they need to answer the questions on a computer instead of using pen and paper. At present optical mark reading (OMR) sheets are used which need to be filled using pen or pencils and are evaluated by machines.

In a statement, Director, IIT-Madras, and Chairman JAB 2017, Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi said, "It has been decided that the JEE (Advanced) will be conducted in online mode from 2018 onwards. Further information regarding the examination will be provided by the JAB in due course." The Ministry of Human Resource Development had earlier introduced the option of taking the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains online.

The JEE-Mains is the entrance examination for admission to engineering courses offered across the country and a qualifying exam for JEE-Advanced which is required for admission to the prestigious IITs and NITs.

"In order to make logistics and evaluations easier it was decided today that the JEE-Advanced should be made online," a JAB member said.

"The concept was being discussed for many years, but it was necessary to have adequate infrastructure to conduct the exam online," the member added. More than 13 lakh students took the JEE-Mains this year, with less than 10 per cent of them going online. Around 2.2 lakh students were eligible to write the JEE (Advanced).