The entrance examination for India’s premier engineering college- Indian Institutes of Technology- will be conducted online from 2018 onwards. The Joint Admission Board, which is the policymaking body on IIT admissions, made the announcement on Sunday after a meeting in Chennai. In a statement, IIT Madras director and JAB 2017 chairman 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.”
JAB members also expressed hope that the online version of the JEE Advanced will ensure that there is greater accuracy and transparency in the test.
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.
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 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% of them going online. Around 2.2 lakh students were eligible to write the JEE (Advanced).
PTI inputs
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