.jpg.transform/576x300/image.jpg)
Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Engineering-Pharmacy Entrance Examinations (KEAM) will be held online from next year. This year it will continue to be held offline as in the past.
The KEAM online examinations will be modelled on the pattern of the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEE) held for B Tech admissions to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs).
CEE invites online test agencies
The Commissioner for Entrance Examinations (CEE), Kerala, has invited Expressions of Interest (EoI) from various agencies for conducting entrance examinations through online mode.
The agencies, which have conducted similar entrance examinations either at the State or national level, can apply.
The EoI containing details such as the maximum number of students that the agencies can accommodate in each online examination centre and the number of computers and internet connections they can provide in each centre should be submitted before April 13.
Why the change
At present, the CEE is conducting online entrance examinations only for LLB, LLM and MBA admissions every year. But since there are a large number of applicants for engineering entrance examinations, the CEE will not be able to single-handedly conduct online examinations, making it necessary to entrust it with an agency having experience in the field. Last time, there were 112,097 applicants for the engineering entrance examinations.
The CEE will directly handle the supervision of the online examination process and the uploading of question papers.
The selected agency will be required to put into operation a minimum of one lakh computer systems and allied technical facilities for the conduct of the online entrance examinations in the State.
How candidates gain
The online engineering entrance examinations will be really advantageous for students. At present, students cannot make changes once they enter an answer to Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) on the OMR sheet. But in online mode, they can easily make changes if they feel that the option given earlier was wrong.
For authorities, the tedious job of printing question papers and OMR sheets can be avoided. The CEE can also do away with the present system of scanning filled-in OMR sheets.