AICTE mulls single entrance test for all management studies

Come 2012 and students aspiring for admissions in management institutes approved by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) will be spared from taking multiple exams. For, the council is planning to hold a single entrance exam for all management studies.

This means, current entrance exams like the Common Admission Test (CAT), Management Aptitude Test (MAT) and other entrance exams, conducted by various state governments, will cease to exist. The idea behind the move is to streamline the process and standardise management entrance exams.

At present, there are 3,800 AICTE-approved management institutes that have almost 4 lakh students. Every year, around 60-70 institutes get added to the list.

“Currently, these institutes consider CAT, MAT or exams conducted by state governments but now we are looking at a single exam so that students don’t have to take these many exams. Moreover, this will be an enabling mechanism for students to get into AICTE-approved colleges,? said SS Mantha, officiating chairman of AICTE.

Almost 1.8 lakh candidates took CAT in 2010 while more than 2 lakh candidates registered for it. On the other hand, 2.5 lakh students wrote MAT in 2010.

In fact, the ministry of human resource development has said that admission to all post-graduate diploma in management (PGDM) courses shall be done through a common entrance test other than minority institutions.

The proposal has faced flak from some associations which feel that it may not exclude the other national level entrance tests such as ATMA (conducted by the Association of Indian Management Schools) or Joint Management Entrance Test or JMET (conducted by Indian Institutes of Technology).

The ministry had also said the admission to PGDM courses will not start before March 31 of the academic year. To this, management associations argue that most of the business schools start the admission process early in the year to avoid clash with the examination schedule or preparation time of BA/BSc/BCom/BTech students.

Experts say there was an anomaly in the proposal as earlier the AICTE norm was that admissions could be through one of the five all-India entrance testes? CAT, JMET, MAT (conducted by All India Management Association), ATMA and XAT (conducted by XLRI). All institutions admitting students on an all-India basis then had to opt for one of these all-India entrance tests.