The Kerala engineering entrance examination will be held online from this year.
The Cabinet on Wednesday ratified an order issued by the Higher Education department entrusting the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations (CEE) with adopting the computer-based test (CBT) mode for the examination. While the government had approved a proposal submitted by the CEE last year, it chose to tread cautiously considering the number of examinees and the logistical hurdles involved in conducting an online examination of such scale.
Faster results
Higher Education Minister R. Bindu said the government has again green-lit the proposal considering the practical difficulties in preparing, printing and transporting question papers, optical mark recognition (OMR) marking and scanning, and the evaluation process. The CBT will significantly reduce the time for preparing the results compared to the OMR-based test.
She told The Hindu the CEE had already received Expressions of Interest from a few agencies, including the State-run Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT). The CEE had also recently invited quotations for security auditing the CBT-based examination.
Combining papers
The CEE has mooted combining both papers (Paper 1 – Physics and Chemistry and Paper 2 – Mathematics) similar to the structure of the Joint Entrance Examination. The three-hour examination is likely to comprise 30 questions each from the three subjects and designed in a manner that assesses the general and subject-specific knowledge.
Though the CEE had earlier proposed conducting the entrance examination twice a year to enable candidates to improve their scores, no decision has been taken in this regard.
Multiple batches
Sources pointed out that the examination will be held in multiple batches considering the availability of centres that are equipped to conduct CBTs. It could also be conducted across multiple days, thereby necessitating more than one set of question papers.
Since an average of nearly 1.2 lakh students register for the entrance examination, the government could abandon the existing practice of conducting the examination from schools and instead conduct the CBTs in engineering colleges having well-equipped computer laboratories.
A preliminary study had estimated the maximum number of examination nodes (networked devices) in the State to range from 10,000 to 20,619.
