This October, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras will be opening the first-ever international campus by an IIT in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The institute will be offering a four-year BS degree in Data Science and AI and a two-year Master of Technology in Data Science and AI at its new campus starting October 2023. The entrance exam for these courses will be held in the month of September. To make it more accessible for students across the globe, IIT Zanzibar will not be accepting admissions based on the highly competitive entrance exam JEE Advanced – which is a UG-level entrance test for admission to IITs’ Indian campuses for BTech courses.
Faculty at India’s top-ranking institute, IIT Madras will develop a screening test. This test will be different from the JEE Advanced as it will focus on multiple areas which are usually not covered in JEE Main and JEE Advanced including analytical ability and English, said Director-in-charge to be of IIT Zanzibar, Professor Preeti Aghalayam. She will be the first-ever woman to lead an IIT.
Candidates who make it through the screening exam will be called for interviews and the final admissions will be announced thereafter. Applications for the 2023 batch are currently open and the total student intake will be 70.
“The courses offered at IIT Madras’ Zanzibar campus are interdisciplinary and not conventional engineering or science programmes. It is well in reason that entrance should also be of different feature,” Prof Aghalayam said in an exclusive interview with News18.
She added, “The plan is to not go with JEE Main or JEE Advanced. The timelines that align locally between the school exams and JEE are not applicable internationally.”
While the exam pattern of the screening test has not been disclosed yet, it is known that the IIT Madras faculty is putting together the screening test. Students from across the world including Indians will be eligible to take the test.
“In the late 50s and 60s, admissions to IITs were based on students’ high school marks and interviews. We are taking cues from those times,” said the professor. At present, foreign students applying for admission to IIT campuses in India even for BTech courses are exempted from taking JEE Main – which is the first step towards IIT entrance. While for Indian students, only the top 2.5 lakh rank holders in JEE Main, are eligible to take JEE Advanced.
The IIT entrance is called one of the toughest exams across the world and is often considered to be a deterrent among foreign nationals who wish to apply for IITs.
Accepting the widely discussed difficult nature of the IIT entrance, Prof Aghalayam said, “There are pros and cons on both sides (of having JEE as the entrance exam). The important thing to consider is that the number of people aspiring for IITs for undergraduate courses is huge in India, thanks to the brand value the institutes have built across the country.”
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