New Delhi, June 28
Students who took the board exams this year but did not score well will get a second chance to improve their school performance in 2013, the year of introduction of the new common engineering entrance test format for admission to IITs and central technical institutes.

Under the new system, a student — to be eligible for IITs — must be in the top 20 percentile of the successful candidates in class XII.

The relaxation was announced today following a day-long meeting of the Council of Boards of School Education in India (COBSE) which has among its members the CBSE and other state boards.

As many as 29 chairpersons of boards attended the meeting which discussed modalities for the 2013 CET exam.

The idea is to secure that every child gets two attempts to enter the IIT system.

Since the new test pattern was announced yesterday, not offering a reappear chance in 2013 to this year’s class XII students would mean killing one of the two attempts they have at entering the IITs.

So those who attempted IIT-JEE in 2012, but failed to get in can take class XII exams in 2013 and improve their school scores to compete again. This year’s eligibility criterion was 60 per cent marks in Class XII.

State boards also agreed to share their previous year’s result data so that it could be analysed and students could be told in advance as to what percentage they should target to be in the top 20 percentile of the successful candidates in Class XII exams.

This data would be put on the CBSE website in 10 days, said Vineet Joshi, Chairman, CBSE.

Also, JEE Advanced, which every engineering aspirant can take, will be offered in both online and pen-and-paper format.

As for board results from 2013, all boards will announce results by June 10 and finish revaluations by June 30. This way, when the IITs prepare their all-India merit list for 1.5 lakh students who sit for JEE Advanced after emerging as top scorers in JEE Main test - to be held in April 2013, they do so only for the eligible candidates.

Gradually, COBSE will design a common question paper for class XII and the boards today agreed to put it into practice in class XI from the academic year 2013-14 and in class XII from 2014-15.

The boards also resolved that Joint Admission Boards (JAB) of all IITs be co-opted as members of COBSE since JAB will conduct JEE Advanced for final admission to IITs.