JEE Advanced should be the entrance exam for both IITs and NITs: NIT proposal

New Delhi: The NIT Council has proposed to the IIT Council that admissions to both IITs and NITs should take place through a single entrance exam – JEE advanced. It is believed that the HRD Minister Smriti Irani favours the proposal for the single entrance exam but the IITs are reluctant to grant equivalence to NITs. The IITs had also been reluctant to allow joint counseling with the NITs for JEE qualifiers.

A member of the IIT Council told the media, “IITs and NITs draw their students from the same pool of engineering aspirants. JEE Advanced has a higher difficulty level and hence, IITs get their pick of the best students who qualify the exam. NITs have also proved themselves to be reasonably good engineering institutes and if they are allowed access to best students too, it is expected that their output quality will improve too. The aim of making JEE Advanced an entrance exam for both groups of institutions is to make one exam, one ranking system and one counselling possible for both NITs and IITs.”

Right now, only 10,000 students get selected through the JEE Advanced exam for admission to the 16 IITs. But the truth is that other JEE Advanced qualifiers who fail to make it to the IITs grab the NIT seats anyways. With the official decision of making JEE Advanced exam as an entry point to both NITs and IITs, 34,000 students will be selected through the exam.