The IIT Joint Council had recently proposed that a common entrance exam be held for admissions to all engineering colleges, including the IITs, from next year.  A final decision on this is pending but Tamil Nadu is not likely to agree to this proposal in the near future. Some of the reasons for this are given below.

Students prefer to study in prestigious colleges within the state. Parents are also not keen on sending their wards to far-off places and are willing to pay the required capitation fees to enroll them in local universities. The school curriculum is based on learning by rote and is exam oriented, and they are not trained to compete at a national level.

To enable more students from rural areas to access professional colleges, the State Government had scrapped entrance exams in the year 2005-2006. This year, out of the 1.04 lakh students admitted to professional colleges, 71,229 were rural candidates. Out of these students, 62,749 were first-generation graduates, and 48,153 were from Tamil-medium schools.

In the unlikely event of the state agreeing to this proposal with a 50 percent home quota, there is still the issue of the exam being held only in English.  A common entrance exam in English will affect the student community from rural areas, as the medium of instruction in most rural schools is Tamil.  The center does not have any plans of conducting the exams in regional languages.