New Delhi, Aug. 18: The Joint Entrance Examination Advanced, which governs BTech admissions to the Indian Institutes of Technology, is likely to become an entirely computer-based test from next year.
Three IIT directors independently told The Telegraph that the Joint Admission Board, made up of all the IIT directors, was expected to clear the proposal at its meeting in Chennai on Sunday.
Currently, the JEE Advanced gives candidates the option of taking the exam in the computer mode, possible only at a handful of centres, but most students prefer a pen-and-paper test at a centre nearer home.
If the exam becomes fully computer-based, every centre will be provided the questions through a CD or encrypted file. The students will open the question paper on a computer and answer each with a click of the mouse.
The Common Admission Test conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management for their postgraduate diploma courses is an entirely computer-based test.
Presently, a JEE Advanced examinee's pen-and-paper answer script is scanned and put through computer evaluation.
An IIT director said a computer-based test would lead to faster evaluation by reducing the need for manual distribution and collection of answer papers and for scanning them. It will also improve fairness by removing the possibility of the scan failing to read an improperly blackened circle.
Several other proposals will be considered at Sunday's meeting but even if accepted, they are unlikely to be implemented before 2019, an IIT director said. ( See chart)
One of the proposals stems from the controversy over the string of flawed or ambiguous questions set in this year's exam, which had to be compensated with across-the-board grace marks and earned the IITs a rap from the apex court.
The court had asked the IITs to work out ways to avoid repeats, and one of the possible solutions suggested has been a pre-prepared question bank, screened thoroughly for ambiguity and other defects.
America's Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), conducted for undergraduate admissions, sets 90 per cent of the questions from a bank while the rest are experimental questions that carry no marks.
If the students, unaware which questions are experimental and forced to attempt all, do not find the experimental questions ambiguous, opaque or too difficult, these are added to the question bank.
However, several IIT teachers believe that the question bank option faces a threat from the Indian genius for engineering leaks.
If the proposal for a question bank is cleared, each of the bank's suggested 25,000 questions may be graded on a difficulty scale of one to ten to ensure a judicious mix of harder and easier questions.
An IIT director said a common criticism of the JEE Advanced was that the standard of the questions was too tough.
"The Union human resource development ministry wants the questions to be such that Class XI and XII students can comfortably answer them. But it's a challenge to assess and rank each question," he said.
Currently, all the questions in any particular section of the paper carry identical marks. But under the proposed system, a question's difficulty level will dictate how many marks it carries.
The ministry also wants the results declared in terms of candidates' percentile score. A candidate's percentile is the number of students ranked below him divided by the number that took the exam, and the dividend multiplied by 100.
It's not clear why the ministry believes this is a better option. Dheeraj Sanghi, an IIT Kanpur teacher, said that percentile scores would leave many more students tied at a single rank than percentage scores did, making the selection process more difficult.
He said the SAT did not award students' exact percentile but only a range within which it fell. "No test can pinpoint where a student stands in his understanding of the subject compared with his peers. That's why SAT gives a range."
IIT Kanpur will hold the JEE Advanced next year.
