One of India’s premier institutes, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) may introduce an early exit option for academically weak students. The students who are unable to cope up with the rigorous academic training given at the IIT’s will be allowed to opt-out after three years with a B.Sc degree in engineering instead of the usual four years.

This proposal is on the IIT council’s agenda which will have a meeting this Friday. IIT Council is a national level body for making decisions with respect to all the 23 IIT’s present in the country. The Council is headed by the HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal.

Currently, the students enrolled under the B.Tech program at the IIT are required to complete four years comprising of eight semesters in order to get the degree. According to the HRD Ministry statistics, in the past two years, 2461 students dropped out of different IITs across its undergraduate and postgraduate programs due to several reasons including being expelled due to poor academic performance. Most of the dropouts occurred in the older IITs – Delhi tops the list with 782 dropouts, followed by 622 in Kharagpur, 263 in Bombay, 190 in Kanpur and 128 in Madras, a report by Hindustan Times on the HRD data said.

For such students, the council has supposedly come up with a plan in order to help the students to at least get a degree after three years instead of dropping out altogether.

Approximately, nine lakh aspirants write the IIT-JEE Mains and Advanced exams every year which is held twice a year of which only 13,500 students get a seat at IIT. Since the efforts that require to get into an IIT are massive. There are many hopefuls who are left out for the students who eventually make it to these prestigious institutions. The whole idea is to help students by giving them an alternative. This system once introduced will motivate and benefit those students who would have lost all hopes of getting a degree. If the Council comes to a conducive agreement in the upcoming meeting, the early exit scheme will be implemented from the current academic year.