Beyond the rank: IITs introduce cross-campus mobility for students

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have initiated something new for their students as the organisation announced that it will open classrooms of one another for students this academic year onwards. The students will be able to enrol in courses in other IIT campuses and will get access to spend a semester outside of their home campus.

The initiative has been done to ease the strict structure of the JEE-based system, as per people familiar with the plan, quoted by Times of India (TOI). Earlier, students' rank in the exam used to decide which IIT they would get.

“We are mapping curricula across multiple programmes in the various IITs,” IIT Madras director Padma Shri V Kamakoti told Times of India. He added, “Once that is matched, our students from IIT Madras can spend a term in another IIT or a student from IIT Kanpur or Delhi or Indore can come to the IIT Madras campus to study some courses and earn credits that we will transfer to the home institute.”

“We recently had a meeting of the academic deans from all the IITs, organised by IIT Madras,” Prathap Haridoss, dean (academics), IIT-M, told the newspaper. “Among several issues discussed, one important topic was credit transfer and student mobility across IITs," he added.

He also said that “one major reason large-scale transfers had not been permitted was the issue of rank integrity: students were originally allotted seats based on rank-specific constraints, and allowing arbitrary transfers could violate that framework.”