IITs to allow undergraduate students to study across 23 campuses

The Indian Institutes of Technology plan to allow undergraduate students to study across all 23 campuses nationwide by enabling the transfer of credits for courses completed at another IIT. The IIT Council, the top coordinating body for the institutes, made this recommendation at its meeting in August last year. It set a target of “5% undergraduate student exchange across IITs, ensuring smooth credit transfer for courses taken at other IITs.” Professor Prathap Haridoss, Dean (Academic Courses), IIT Madras, said the details are being worked out, and each IIT would have to clear the matter at its Senate level. “We are working on the circumstances under which we will enable this…at the Council level, there is agreement. But procedurally, we are formalising a document on which every senate would have to agree on some fundamental level. Then we can start rolling it out as more of them clear it through their senate. We’re still in the document stage. It would be preferable if we had a common document,” Prof Haridoss said. While the Council meeting mentioned 5 per cent of undergraduate students, Prof Haridoss said it is being worked out. “Operationally, we will have constraints. When we enable transfers, the hostel capacity will be a constraint if there are more students coming into an institute than going out,” he said. “We have sports excellence admissions, and fine arts and culture excellence admissions. If there is a great coaching facility in Delhi, maybe a student under the sports excellence admissions can spend one or two semesters at IIT Delhi, complete their coaching, and come back. These avenues were not there previously, and we felt the need to enable students to move,” he explained. ## Internships and electives It could also facilitate internships and allow students to transfer for electives taught by a specific subject expert at a particular IIT, Prof Haridoss said. “We used to have only summer internships, from May to July. But many found it restrictive. So, in our curriculum, we have arranged it so that in the sixth semester, students only have electives… There are four electives. Students have enough room in their credit requirements to shift those four electives to the previous or next semester, keeping their entire sixth semester free for an internship. If we enable transfers, they can do those electives at another IIT, and won’t have to push it to another semester,” he added. “There may be electives in some other IIT that we may not have, and we may have something that other IITs don’t have. A specialist in an elective area may not be present at every IIT. We find students like that… who look at the details of every course and make a very conscious decision about why they are taking or not taking a course. For such students, this kind of (transfer) facility is useful,” he said, adding that it could also enable students to pursue other activities like start-ups, without it affecting academic progress. The Council also recommended that an inter-IIT team led by IIT Madras design a “flexible credit-sharing framework with other non-IIT institutions such as NITs, IIITs, IISERs, NLUs, etc, enabling cross-institutional learning and developing implementation guidelines and timelines,” going by the minutes of the Council’s meeting released last month. “With the NITs, we have a programme by which final year students can come to IIT Madras. They do their final semester here, and work with our faculty. If the student and faculty are comfortable, they move into a direct PhD programme with us. In this context, we will have to see if we need to expand that,” Prof Haridoss said. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan is the chairperson of the IIT Council. The Council includes all IIT directors, and the chairpersons of their Board of Governors.