Somehow, every news coming from IIT is becoming one of national importance. Sibal announced the hiking of the qualifying marks of the examination of class XII for being allowed for IIT-JEE. The protests from CMs and political leaders such as Mayawati and Lalu made Sibal withdraw his proposal.

Sibal did also wish to have a common board for all states. Many and I too will back Sibal. Why should each state have a board of its own not only for secondary and higher secondary education, but also separate agencies for the control of admission examinations for engineering and management institutes. The states are trying to have hold on the education so that the interests of local politicians get served. It adds only to corruption in education sector and no way helps the student community. Only with one common curricula and examination can eliminate the differential in standards of students from various boards. Only in that case, the IIT-JEE can be based on the same curricula and will be justifying for the students completing class XII from anywhere in the country.

As reported, Sibal wishes to discourage the coaching industry. I don’t know if the faculty and IITs are interested in getting coaching industry eliminated. As I understand many former IITians are running the coaching institutes. We had an open examination system in IIT, Kharagpur. The students were allowed to carry all books and notes. I have seen many carrying huge lots of those books, but that hardly helped them. Only those who understood the subject that was taught did well. Why the faculty of IITs, who set the papers, can’t innovate the way of examination and devising questions on the subjects in a manner that make coaching defunct?

Is it not surprising that some teachers in some of these coaching institutes make even Rs 2 crore a year? Does the coaching only make the understanding of the subjects among the students better that the normal teaching in the schools does because of the poor quality in teaching? If the teachers of coaching institutes can teach the subjects to succeed in IIT-JEE, why can’t the teachers of the schools?

And here is the news related to RTI about the score in entrance examination IIT-JEE: “IITs find novel way to block transparency. It will provide RTI data as hard copy, which would run to thousands of pages, not on CDs. According to IIT Guwahati director, it’s to prevent misuse of electronic data.”

Why can’t the score of each candidate be placed on IIT’s IIT-JEE site? Why should it be kept secret? I am sure the IIT system doesn’t wish to manipulate anything in selection of the successful students.