The Indian Institutes of Technology Joint Entrance Examination was an annual engineering
college entrance examination in India.
It was used as the sole admission test by the fifteen Indian Institutes of Technology,
Indian School of Mines and IIT BHU.
The examination was organised each year by one of the various IITs, using a round robin
rotation pattern.
It had a very low admission rate.
In 2013 it was replaced by the two-phase Joint Entrance Examination.
History The IIT-JEE was conducted for the first time
in 1960, when it had four subjects including an English language paper.
The examination since evolved considerably from its initial pattern.
The IIT-JEE was initially called the Common Entrance Exam; its creation coincided with
that of the 1961 IIT Act.
In 1997, the IIT-JEE was conducted twice after the question paper was leaked in some centers.
Between 2000 and 2005, an additional screening test was used alongside the main examination,
intended to reduce pressure on the main examination by allowing only about 20,000 top candidates
to sit the paper, out of more than 450,000 applicants.
In September 2005, an analysis group of directors of all the IITs announced major reforms to
the examination.
These were implemented from 2006 onwards.
The revised test consisted of a single objective test, replacing the earlier two-test system.
In order to be eligible for the main examination, candidates in the general category had to
secure a minimum of 60% aggregated marks in the qualifying examination of the XIIth standard
organized by various educational boards of India, while candidates belonging to Scheduled
Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Physically Disabled categories must secure a minimum of 55%.
In 2008, the Director and the Dean of IIT Madras called for revisions to the examination,
arguing that the coaching institutes were "enabling many among the less-than-best students
to crack the test and keeping girls from qualifying".
They expressed concern that the present system did not allow for applicants' 12 years of
schooling to have a bearing on admissions into IITs.
In 2008, the Indian Institutes of Technology, for the first time, went overseas with their
entrance examination as they set up a centre for the competitive test in Dubai.
The number of candidates appearing in Dubai hovered around 200 to 220.
Seats The number of students taking the examination
increased substantially each year with over 485,000 sitting IIT-JEE 2011.
This represented an increase of 30,000 students from 2010.
The availability of seats in recent years is as shown below:
From 2008, six new IITs were opened with 120 seats each, increasing the total number of
seats to almost 7000.
For 2009, admissions were made to two more IITs, namely IIT Indore and IIT Mandi taking
the seat count to almost 8300.
In 2011, with additional courses in several old and new IITs, the total seat count crossed
9600.
Criticism In 2012, Super 30 founder and mathematician
Anand Kumar criticised the New Admission Norms, saying that the decision of the IIT Council
to give chance to students having top 20% from various boards in the class 12 examinations,
was a decision in haste.
"This is one decision that will go against the poor, who don't have the opportunity to
study in elite schools," he added.
IIT-JEE was conducted only in English and Hindi, which was criticised as making it harder
for students where regional languages, like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu, Oriya, Bengali,
Marathi, Assamese or Gujarati, are more prominent.
In September 2011, the Gujarat High Court acted on a Public Interest Litigation by the
Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, demanding the exams be conducted in Gujarati.
A second petition was made in October by Navsari's Sayaji Vaibhav Sarvajanik Pustakalaya Trust.
Another petition was made at the Madras High Court for conducting the exam in Tamil.
In the petition it was claimed that not conducting the exam in the regional languages is in violation
of article 14 of the Constitution of India.
PMK, political party in Tamil Nadu holds a demonstration at Chennai for conducting IIT-JEE
and other national entrance exams in regional languages also, particularly Tamil in Tamil
Nadu.
Pattali Makkal Katchi party has filed Public Interest Litigation in Madras High Court for
conducting IIT JEE entrance exam in Tamil also.
They submitted that every year 7.63 lakh students were completing 12th standard in Tamil Nadu,
75% of them from Tamil Medium.
They had to take the entrance exam in English or Hindi, neither of which was their medium
of instruction nor their mother tongue, and so were denied their fundamental right to
take up the entrance exam in their medium of instruction, based on their mother tongue.Shiv
Sena urged MHRD to conduct IITJEE and other national undergraduate entrance exams in regional
languages, particularly Marathi language in Maharastra.
See also Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering
Indian Science Engineering Eligibility Test Joint Management Entrance Test
All India Engineering Entrance Examination References
External links