Government appointed panel has given a new proposal that a single entrance test and a common examination will be conducted for all the Engineering and Management institutes under All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). This proposal may be put into practice when the proposal is approved.

If this proposal gets green signal, then students will not have to appear for multiple entrance examinations for getting admissions in different institutions. Recommendations of setting up a National Testing Service to conduct exam has also been made. As of records, currently there are about 11,000 engineering and management institutes and these are under AICTE.

A National Testing Service (NTS) should be established to conduct the tests, which can be an independent body controlled by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or it could outsource the work to different agencies. There are many advantages of this National Testing Service.

A common NTS will conduct the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission into engineering courses and a Common Admission Test (CAT) for management courses, the Results of which can be used by all institutes, whether under universities, deemed universities, private universities, state government-run universities, etc.

As in one of the newspaper reports, these recommendations have also been posted on the official website to seek the views of stakeholders. The panel also suggested that seats remaining vacant after the conclusion of counselling sessions should not be included in the management quota and should instead be used to accommodate candidates in the waiting list of these examinations.

Different states, private universities and institutes have their own entrance tests for the same kind of course, making it more burden for the students and so this recommendation would reduce the ease out their burden. The recommendations, put up on a website, are awaiting the opinion of stakeholders.