COUNSELLING FOR roughly 40,000 seats across 100 premier technical institutes, including IITs, NITs, IIITs and IIEST, is likely to be held over just six rounds this year. Normally, all Centrally Funded Technical Institutes admit students over seven rounds of joint counselling. The proposal to drop one round of counselling this year was floated by IIT-Delhi this week and has been forwarded to the Joint Implementation Committee for approval, The Indian Express has learnt. Read| Colleges offering AI-powered ‘exams from home’: All you need to know about proctoring The joint panel comprises JEE Chairmen of all IITs. IIT-Delhi is the organising institute for JEE (Advanced) 2020. If accepted by all IITs, this proposal will be shared with the Central Seat Allocation Board, which coordinates admission for the NITs, IIITs and IIEST. In other words, IIT-Delhi’s proposal will have a bearing on the admission process for all Centrally Funded Technical Institutions as they have a joint admission process. In addition to dropping one round of counselling, IIT-Delhi has also suggested that results or the All India Rank for JEE (Advanced) 2020 should be declared within a week of the exam. Usually, it takes the organising institute two weeks to announce results. JEE (Advanced) is scheduled on August 23. Early declaration of JEE (Advanced) results and less number of counselling rounds, sources in IIT-Delhi said, will help the IITs start classes for first-year students by early October. “This is possible provided we complete six rounds of counselling between September 1 and October 1,” said a source. In most IITs, the new session usually begins in the last week of July. Video | JEE Main, NEET exam dates The indicative academic calendar issued by the University Grants Commission early this month had proposed that the new academic calendar for the fresh batch of students should ideally commence in the first week of September. However, with the lockdown upsetting the entrance exam calendar by almost three months, starting the new session in the first week of September seems impossible for the IITs. Asked if the plan to drop the seventh round of counselling could leave the institutes with more vacant seats this year, the above-quoted source said, “The proposal was made after studying data of the last two years. It was felt that the seventh round didn’t make much of a difference as far as filling up vacant seats is concerned. Students used the seventh round more to change over to preferred branches.”
