This year, 12 lakh youngsters sat for the annual JEE Main for admission to engineering institutions. Predictably, many 
could not make the grade, while others would have wanted to improve their scores, but their next opportunity would have come only a year later. This will no longer be the case, with the government announcing on Saturday that from 2019, aspirants will be able to sit twice a year for not only JEE Main, but also NEET for entry into medical colleges.
Examinees will be able to appear for JEE Main in January and April of every year and for NEET in February and May for the academic sessions beginning in August of that year. This will allow an examinee to choose either of the months to attempt the engineering or medical entrance test, or to repeat the test if the first score doesn’t prove satisfactory.
University Grants Commission (UGC)’s National Eligibility Test (NET) would be conducted in December by National Testing Agency (NTA). The detailed notification is yet to be released by the organisers, but it can be expected any time.
Points:
- Starting 2019, aspirants will be able to sit twice a year for the JEE Main and NEET exams
- Examinees will be able to appear for JEE Main in January and April of every year and for NEET in February and May
- NTA will begin with the University Grants Commission’s National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) for college and university teachers.
- The exams will be conducted by the newly formed National Testing Agency
| UGC NET | CMAT/GPAT | JEE | NEET | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 1 | Round 2 | ||
| Online application | 01.09.2018 to 30.09.2018 | 22.10.2018 to 15.12.2018 | 2nd week of Mar 2019 | 01.09.2018 to 30.09.2018 | 2nd week of Feb 2019 | 01.10.2018 to 31.10.2018 | 2nd week of Mar 2019 |
| Dates of examination | 02.12.2018 to 16.12.2018 | 27.01.2019 | 12.05.2019 to 26.05.2019 | 06.01.2019 to 20.01.2019 | 07.04.2019 to 21.04.2019 | 03.02.2019 to 17.02.2019 | 12.05.2019 to 26.05.2019 |
| Declaration of results | Last week of Jan 2019 | 1st week of Feb 2019 | 1st week of June 2019 | 1st week of Feb 2019 | 1st week of Mar 2019 | 1st week of June 2019 | |
The exams will be conducted by the newly formed National Testing Agency (NTA), which will take care of the variation in difficulty levels in the two tests in each course through the use of specialised standardisation techniques while determining the final scores.
The marks obtained in JEE Main determine admissions to the National Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Information Technology and other government-funded technical institutes that together offer around 24,000 engineering seats. Many private schools also use JEE Main marks for their admission processes. High JEE Main scores are a benchmark for IIT aspirants, who then appear for the JEE Advance tests. NEET tests regulate admissions to around 60,000 undergraduate medical seats.
The computer-based tests will be conducted by NTA and not the Central Board of Secondary Education and other agencies like the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) as at present. “All entrance exams which were conducted by CBSE, such as UGC-NET, JEE Main and NEET, will now be conducted by NTA,” Union human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar said on Saturday.
NTA will begin with the University Grants Commission’s National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET) for college and university teachers, requiring a post graduate degree, from December 2018. From 2019, NTA will also conduct the Graduate Pharmacy Aptitude Test (GPAT) and Common Management Admission Test (CMAT) both conducted by AICTE so far.
With JEE Main and NEET being conducted twice for a single admission process, there will be a need to standardise the scores from the two sittings, say of January and April 2019 for JEE admissions of August 2019. “We will ensure that the difficulty levels are same across papers,” said a senior HRD official. However, the tests will be equated nevertheless using psychometric methods, standardisation techniques and the best of the equated scores will be used for admissions in case of variation in difficulty levels.
From August this year, NTA will start providing experience of computer-based tests through dedicated centres and test downloads free of cost to acclimatise candidates to the new system. The HRD ministry assured that the syllabus would remain the same and there would be no increase in cost of application while the exams will be more transparent and leak proof.
“This year in JEE-main 2.5 lakh candidates sat for the computer-based exam while the rest took a pen and paper exam. Computers will ensure security, transparency of exams and will be similar to international practice,” said Javadekar.
Around 13 lakh aspirants sat for NEET this year, and 12 lakh for JEE Main. UGC-NET generally logs around 12 lakh registrations, while one lakh aspirants sit for the CMAT, and another 40,000, the GPAT.
NTA will soon provide a list of computer centres. Some of these will double up as practice centres free of cost for students who don’t have personal computers. Javadekar said that this will ensure exams are leak-proof, of international standards and are much more convenient for candidates as they will be computer-based and allow faster declaration of results.
