A Wednesday meeting of the IIT Council, the highest decision-
making body of the IITs, has decided to have a common entrance
test for IITs/NITs, state government-run and private engineering
colleges throughout the country from 2013. What will be the
common entrance test be like: The test is based on the
recommendations of the T Ramaswami committee, under which a new
kind of Joint Entrance Examination would be held. In the new JEE
weightage would be given to class XII marks of students and a
Scholastic Aptitude Test-kind of test. The IIT panel has to look
into various options given by the committee, before taking any
final decision. Regarding which among the two -- the class XII
marks and the SAT-like test – would have the more weightage,the
HRD Minsiter Mr Kapil Sibal said that the marks scored by
students in class XII would be `normalized' through a formula
devised by experts of the Indian Statistical Institute. But the
experts advised the normalization system after doing a pilot
study of only four out of 42