Give more weightage to Class 12 marks, Sibal tells IITs

New Delhi, Oct 19 : Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) should give more weightage to the Class 12 examination marks for admission to the undergraduate courses, union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said Monday.

Sibal stressed that the IIT admission procedures "should give more weightage to Class 12 exam marks" as well as consider raising the existing 60 percent cut-off percentage for students to appear in the IIT-Joint Entrance Examination.

The minister made the comments while chairing a meeting of the IIT Council here.

Sibal proposed a new system under which only high-scoring Class 12 students will be allowed to sit for the entrance exams to professional courses and the cut-off percentage for being eligible to write these exams would be 80-85 percent instead of the current 60 percent.

IIT-Delhi professor M. Balakrishnan told IANS: "This proposal has been mooted for almost a year now. There is talk in the ministry and among IITs to take such a decision soon."

At the IIT Council meeting, the minister said he also wanted to get rid of professional coaching for medical and engineering exams.

"All proposed changes would be implemented by 2011," a senior ministry official said.

However, coaching centres like Career Launcher, which trains students to face the competitive exam, said that doing away with the coaching centres or increasing weightage for the Class 12 exam marks was not the real solution.

"The coaching centres will not be affected if the entrance exams focus on Class 12 marks. Because we as an industry cater to what inputs are required, so we would train for the IIT-JEE and the board exams. Coaching centres exist because of the existing lacuna at schools. The thrust should be on raising the standard of board exams and to focus on application rather than rote learning," Gautam Puri, vice-chairman of Career Launcher, told IANS.

Sibal has also asked for setting up a five-member committee to make the IITs more competitive. Another committee has been constituted to look into the IIT curriculum.