Low-Staking Exams, Addressing Mental Health Among IIT-Kanpur Director’s Suggestions At Visitor’s Conference – News18

Last Updated:March 05, 2025, 11:51 IST

IIT-Kanpur director Prof Manindra Agrawal suggested lowering exam stakes, removing the 75% marks cap for Northeast students, addressing mental health, and reviewing the NIRF ranking system.

“Low staking of examinations” and considering removing 75 per cent marks cap in class 12 exam for Northeast region for effective student selection to academic institutions; addressing mental health issues of students and faculty and; “reviewing” the Indian rankings system — are some of the key suggestions made by IIT-Kanpur director during the two-day Visitor’s conference at Rashtrapati Bhawan that concluded on Tuesday.

The conference that was attended by educationists and policymakers focused on five themes to improve higher education scenario including – flexibility in academic courses; internationalisation efforts and collaboration; translational research and innovation; effective student selection processes and respecting student choices; and effective assessments and evaluation.

Prof Manindra Agrawal, director of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)- Kanpur, while presenting the summary on effective student selection methods, said it was required to lower the examination stakes and reduce the burden of coaching on students.

Speaking about the challenges in the process, he said that coming to effective selection of students in academic institutions the challenges are manifold, particularly in the undergraduate (UG) programmes.

“When we look at the UG admissions, there are way too many entrance examinations, coaching has become a real burden on our student body leading to a lot of stress, neglect of school education. There is also a question as to do we really need very subject-specific examinations,” the IIT director said.

Many of the institutions are hampered by delayed declaration of results by the National Testing Agency (NTA) and another challenge, which is specific to rural and northeastern region, is how to mainstream those students, he added.

Low-staking entry-level exams

One of the key suggestions to address these challenges is to lower the entrance exam stakes and thereby reduce the burden of coaching — this was part of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recommendations as well — that institutions should aim to transition to LOFT (linear-on-the fly-testing) model, which is essentially an aptitude-based test, which can be adopted so that it can be taken anywhere at any time by students.

“Also, there are a number of studies for SAT, which is a similar examination, which show that after 30-40 hours of coaching, the impact of coaching becomes minimal, which will certainly help reduce its impact,” he said.

Coming to the specific requirement for NE region, he said, it was learnt that several National Institutes of Technology (NITs) located in the region are not able to fill up seats reserved for this region because of the 75 per cent aggregate requirement in class 12 exam not being met by many. Currently, students having 75 per cent aggregate in class 12 (10+2) examination only are eligible to sit for the engineering entrance examination.

“The government must consider removing this 75 per cent cap for NE region as well as rural areas so that they can get admission to NITs,” said Prof Agrawal.

Addressing mental health, ‘relook’ at NIRF

Prof Agrawal spoke about the broader challenges faced by higher education institutions including concerns on mental health issues for which he also sought support from the union Ministry of Education (MoE). “Finally coming to other broader challenges, we face in our system today, one of the biggest is the mental health issues. The way the society today is, various pressures are acting up and students as well as faculty are facing increased stress. Our system, all of us collectively need to take special steps to address this concern,” he said.

There are many institutions, he said, where one of the reasons they are unable to implement several measures is because the academic leadership is not immediately available or there are certain delays in the appointments of those people. “This is something we request the ministry to take note of and help institutions with,” he said.

Another issue he flagged was the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) mechanism, which the IIT-K director said perhaps “needs a relook because it is introducing distortions into the system”.

“A number of institutions are simply trying to gain the parameters, which was certainly not the intent. The intent was to identify the institutions that are doing well and identify their strengths and weaknesses so that they can focus on improvement. So, there’s a need to review the way NIRF ranking is done and take appropriate measures for the same,” said Prof Agrawal.

Use of AI for evaluations, allowing courses in hybrid mode

Speaking about the challenges faced by Indian higher education institutions, the IIT-Kanpur director said that in India there is a wide variety of institutions from very small ones with a small body of students to large universities with 50,000+ students, so one size or one prescription cannot fit all, because the problems faced by large universities are very different from small ones.

“Particularly, the large universities are struggling for basic infrastructure. For them their more immediate concern is to how to facilitate students with basics. They also face the challenge that even though when they bring in innovation in the curriculum, students are not ready to avail of it because for example, UPSC is still focusing on traditional subjects and not looking at the new age subjects, which makes lot of students in universities tend to focus on traditional subjects,” he said.

Regular evaluations are also very time-consuming for large systems while they also face a challenge in selection of faculty because of restrictions on what should be the background of the faculty, he added.

“To address some of these key issues one suggestion is to use AI when we have to do large-scale evaluations. Today we have AI-based tools which can significantly speed up these evaluations,” he said.

Further for smooth movement of students from one institution to another, the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) is already in place and needs to “enabled” even more to ensure the same.

Another key suggestion the IIT-Kanpur director made was to allow courses in the hybrid mode to reach out to a much larger body of students and institutions given that as a whole as country there are resource constraints so as much as possible institutions should share resources.

“If there’s a specific course being offered at one institution, it should be possible to offer it to students of another institution as well,” he said.