File picture of OJEE aspirants outside an exam centre in Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneswar, Nov. 2: The state will join the Joint Entrance Examination (main) system for admission to premier technical institutes in the country from next year.

The Central Board of Secondary Education today issued an official release stating that Gujarat, Maharashtra and Odisha had joined the system.

Till last year, the state had been conducting the exams for admissions into 44,000 engineering seats in eight government colleges and 90 private colleges across the state.

The board release said the information bulletin containing details of examination, syllabus, eligibility and so on, along with the process of normalisation of marks, would be available on the Joint Entrance Examination (main) website by the second week of November, 2014.

Last year, secretary of the employment and technical education and training department Chandra Sekhar Kumar had announced that the state would not conduct the exams from 2014. It had, however, put forth some suggestions before the department of higher education under the Union ministry of human resource development to be part of the national engineering test.

The suggestions included publishing of a separate merit list for the state candidates and filling up of 15 per cent seats through the state admission agency.

“We are not sure if the suggestions have been incorporated as we are yet to receive a formal communication from the board,” an official said.

“Taking part in the national exams will save the students a lot of time and money. Earlier, the aspirants used to submit fee for a multiple number of times and appear for multiple entrance exams. Now, the aspirants will be required to submit only one-time fee,” he said.

The state will also save the expenses that were earlier spent to set up multiple nodal centres to hold the tests,” said the official.

Last year, at least 20,000 students from across the state took the offline joint entrance exams (main) held in Rourkela.

The entrance tests will be the gateway for admissions to undergraduate engineering programmes in the IITs, National Institutes of Technology, Delhi Technological University and other centrally funded technical institutes.

The state had taken part in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test, a common all-India exam for medical admissions, last year.