New Delhi, September 20
Months of speculation over the future of the proposed common engineering test for entry to undergraduate engineering programmes of centrally funded technical institutes ended today with the Ministry of HRD announcing the replacement of AIEEE with JEE (main), which will be held on April 7 next year.

JEE (main) will be single test for admission to all 47 central technical institutes (including 30 NITs, 4 IIITs and 4 NITTTRs,) barring IITs. The 15 IITs will hold a two-part JEE (advanced) on June 2 for entry to their system. Top 1.50 lakh scorers of JEE (main), which will serve as screening test for IITs, will be eligible to take JEE (advanced). SC/ST/OBC quota will be retained at screening level. India has 81 CFTIs which include 13 IIMs (postgraduate management institutes), and six science institutes, including IISERs and IISc Bangalore. Science colleges have been exempted from new format. It will be restricted to engineering disciplines.

JEE (main) will determine entry to more than half of institutes. JEE (main) merit list will be based on 40% weightage of school board marks obtained by the candidate (normalised across boards) in Class XII (or equivalent exams) and 60 per cent weightage of JEE (main). “The 40% weightage to school board exams marks will be considered only after normalisation of marks across all state boards,” said CBSE which will hold JEE (main).

For IITs, of 1.50 lakh aspirants, only those will be declared successful who also fall in the top 20 percentile of the successful Class XII students in the respective school board exams that year.

JEE (main) results will be out by May and qualifying candidates will be required to fill up JEE (advanced) forms in offline mode. IITs, it may be recalled, were opposed to higher (40 pc) weightage for Class XII marks throughout the discussions on a single test which HRD Minister Kapil Sibal initiated in 2008 to forge a ‘one nation one test era.’ There will still be two tests (as now) from 2013 — JEE (main) (new name for CBSE AIEEE) and JEE (advanced) (new name for IIT JEE). Even the formats of new tests will be the same as AIEEE and IIT JEE.

Gujarat is the only state which has agreed to admit students based on JEE (main) merit list. Clarifying the states can make their own selections for state university colleges, the CBSE said, “If a state wants to admit students in engineering colleges affiliated to state universities and needs a separate merit list, the same will also be prepared with relative weightage of Class XII and JEE (main) as states desire.”