Panel ignored experts’ concerns on IIT reforms
NEW DELHI: Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, experts had cautioned against comparing Class 12 exam performances across different boards for admissions to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other engineering schools — but their concerns were ignored.
NEW DELHI: Indian Statistical Institute ( ISI), Calcutta, experts had cautioned against comparing Class 12 exam performances across different boards for admissions to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other engineering schools — but their concerns were ignored.
The ISI experts, asked by the human resource development (HRD) ministry panel that devised the government’s admissions reform plan, concluded that scores of students across different schools boards could not be compared.
Told then by the government panel headed by science secretary T Ramasami to tell them the best way to compare scores across Boards, the experts — Probal Chaudhari and Debasis Sengupta — submitted revised recommenda- tions, the ISI professors told HT. But these recommendations – for a broader study — were also ignored, documents with HT show.
The government and the IIT Council — the apex decision-making body of the IITs — have maintained in public that the ISI experts had approved their plan to compare scores across different boards. Asked on Monday about the experts’ recommendations the government ignored, Ramasami, current- ly in Germany, argued that the suggestions were not binding.
“We are clear that what we have done is fine,” Ramasami said. “We don’t have to accept what the experts recommended. What they say doesn’t become law.”
Over 10 lakh students appear for engineering entrance tests each year. The new admission criteria require students to score among the top 20 percentile in their board to be eligible for IIT admissions. Board percentile scores will receive 50 percent weightage in selections to National Institutes of Technology and other schools that join the HRD ministry’s CET from 2013.
The experts were provided Class 12 scores from the Central Board of Secondary Education, the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education and the West Bengal and Tamil Nadu boards. Based on a statistical analysis, they concluded a “lack of comparability of scores from different boards in India” for indi- vidual subjects, and so for aggregate scores.
“We were told not to worry whether scores could be compared or not, but to only provide the best way to compare them,” Sengupta said.
The experts’ revised report, submitted in November 2011, suggested percentile ranks as the best way to compare scores. But they recommended that their analysis be carried out for a longer period of time before using board scores. It wasn’t.