The stand-off between the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Council and IIT Senates ended on Wednesday following an agreement between the various stakeholders.

Under the agreed format, students would be eligible for admission to the elite engineering colleges provided their class XII marks fall in the top 20 percentile of their respective boards.

Further, admissions to IITs would be based solely on the ranks achieved in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced, while JEE Mains will act as a screening test. Only the top 1,50,000 candidates in JEE Mains, or the former All India Engineering Entrance Examination, would be eligible to appear in the JEE Advanced examination.

The new model of examination will come into effect from 2013.

The HRD Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, who is also the chairman of the IIT Council, did not attend this decisive meeting. Prof M.M. Sharma, Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIT Madras, chaired the meet, which included the directors and chairmen of all the IITs.

The other recommendations of the Joint Admission Board (JAB) were that there should be a gap between the JEE Mains and Advanced exams; the Advanced examination will have an exclusive JAB and a Joint Implementation Committee and these two bodies will also coordinate with the organising body responsible for conducting the Mains.

According to the Chairman of CBSE, Mr Vineet Joshi, the approximate cut-off to be eligible for admissions to IITs, keeping in mind the 20 percentile cut-off, would be 78 per cent in CBSE, 65 per cent in UP Board and 78 per cent in Tamil Nadu Board.

Prof K. Narasimhan, President of the All India IIT Faculty Federation, said, “This is a good proposal by the Council and is in sync with the top clauses of the majority of IIT Senates.”

>aesha.datta@thehindu.co.in

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