New Delhi: Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), first choice for India’s engineering aspirants, will now hold its entrance test abroad, starting next year.
Test for admissions into prestigious IITs will be held in Singapore, the UAE and SAARC countries, except in Pakistan, the Deccan Chronicle reported.
However, Pakistan has been excluded from the list of SAARC nations where the entrance test for undergraduate and postgraduate courses will be held in 2017. Apart from India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation or SAARC.
The IITs have decided to hold the entrance test in foreign locations so that they could select foreign students for undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
The newspaper quoted sources as saying that Pakistan has been excluded from the list due to various issues including that of students procuring visas for study in India.
As per daily, “The entrance tests to the IITs abroad have been held till now only to admit Indian nationals. This is for the first time that it has been planned to admit foreign students through tests held abroad. It is aimed that the plan would be operationalised from the JEE/GATE exams to be conducted in 2017,” sources said.
The selection of students will be done through a common entrance exam which would be administered by the IIT with the help of Indian missions in these countries.
The fee applicable in the case of foreign students will also be more as the subsidised fee which Indians pay would not be applicable to them.
Some additional seats have been allocated for foreign students but it would remain the same for Indian students, said sources, as per the daily.
