November 24, 2020.
TED NewsDesk, New Delhi: As conveyed by the officials, the National Testing Agency plans to shift the month of conducting Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)-Main from January to February. With the increasing number of COVID-19 cases, the authorities plan to take this step. Besides, the admission process for the current engineering batch is still going on. The administration is yet to issue an official notice regarding the same. The application portal is likely to open next month.
“As the engineering admission is still underway, it is being considered that JEE-Main of 2021 be pushed to February. This will give a chance to students who were not satisfied with the choice of the branch or their score,” a senior official said.
“Rising number of coronavirus cases is also a factor,” he added.
Recently in October, the government planned to expand the area of JEE-Main by including several regional languages as the medium. Presently, the exam offers Hindi, English and Gujarati mediums.
Being one of the most important entrance exams in India for admission to many undergraduate engineering and architecture programmes, lakhs of students apply every year. JEE-Advanced follows JEE-Main, thus enabling the qualifiers to secure admission in IITs. The NTA conducts JEE twice a year- January and April. However, this year it had to postpone the April exam two times in row owing to the lockdown. As a result, it conducted the exam in September.
In 2020, around 8.58 lakh candidates applied for JEE-Main. However, only 74% of the applicants showed up on the day of the examination.
In the view of COVID-19 and the Centre’s guidelines regarding the same, the NTA adopted several safety measures like increasing the number of examination centres, alternate seating plans, fewer candidates per room and staggered entry and exit to organise the entrance test.
JEE is the gateway for the students to secure admissions in reputed colleges of the country like IITs, NITs along with other Centrally Funded Technical Institutions (CFTIs). Till 2018, CBSE conducted the exam. NTA took over CBSE in 2019.
Source: Financial Express