The Bengal joint entrance examination board will hold a separate round of counselling this year for students who will crack the JEE Main exams, which are set to be held in September, an official of the board said.
The board this year will hold counselling in two phases, unlike previous years when it used to be held in one phase. The decision to postpone the JEE Main exams, usually held in April, to the first week of September because of the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted the board to stagger the counselling schedule.The NITs and the IIEST, Shibpur, among other institutes, admit students through the JEE Main.
Ten per cent of the seats in Bengal’s private engineering colleges are set aside for those who crack the JEE Main so that vacancies could be minimised. The 86 private engineering colleges in Bengal can admit 28,493 students to their undergraduate courses.
A notice uploaded on the Bengal JEE board’s website says: “There will be two separate counselling: 1) for those WBJEE-rank holders for all those seats except those reserved for JEE-main candidates and 2) for JEE-Main rank holders and for those seats (in architecture) that require National Aptitude Test in Architecture score.”
The rescheduled JEE Main exams are to be held from September 1 to 6.
“This year, the counselling for students whose names figure on the state JEE merit list is likely to start on August 12. The counselling for the JEE Main students and those aspiring to pursue BTech in architecture would be held later,” said Dibyendu Kar, the JEE board registrar.
The counselling for the state JEE-rank holders will be held in at least three rounds.
A board official said that according to rules of the Architecture Council of India, an architecture aspirant has to crack the Bengal JEE and the National Aptitude Test in Architecture (NATA) or the paper-II of the JEE Main.
The first test of NATA has been scheduled for August 28. The date of the second test is yet to be decided.
“Until these tests are over, the counselling for admission to the architecture course cannot be held. The engineering colleges in the state together have 141 seats in architecture,” said Dilip Mitra, the vice-chairman of the JEE board.
What if the JEE Main cannot be held because of the raging pandemic? “If such a situation arises, the state higher education department is authorised to decide that the 2,849 seats — the ones in the state’s private engineering colleges that are reserved for students cracking the JEE Main — be filled with students from the Bengal JEE merit list.
“Seats cannot be allowed to remain vacant. However, we are not sure how the seats in the architecture could be filled in case the required tests cannot be held,” an official in the higher education department said.
The JEE board will announce the counselling schedule for each round on Monday. The board will post updates on its Facebook page and YouTube about how to take part in the online counselling, which has several new features designed in the wake of the pandemic.
