GATE will be online from 2014

The Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) will conduct the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) online from next academic year because of its increasing popularity. The Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur, on Thursday released a tender advertisement inviting service agencies to send technical and commercial bids to it as it is conducting GATE this year.

IIT-Kharagpur professor said, “The growing number of applications we are receiving from candidates has prompted us to take the examination completely online. We have been in the past, conducting a few papers online.” In 2013, GATE noticed the highest 1.21 million registrations. Last year, 7, 50,000 had registered for GATE.

There are many colleges which enrol students on the bases of GATE scores, the number of GATE takers has increased in last few years. Earlier, however, GATE was used as a qualifying examination for the ministry of human resource development assistantship. Umesh Bellur, organising chairman, GATE 2013, IIT-Bombay had said, “Conducting exams is an academic exercise and given GATE is a fairly standardised test and is conducted on an all-India scale, it brings economies of scale to public sector units and they can concentrate on interviews.”

GATE is administered and held by the Indian Institute of Science and IITs. Those who qualify the examination are eligible for taking admission in graduate programmes with government scholarships or assistantships in engineering colleges and universities.

In last few years, the exam has been gradually incorporated online mode in some of the streams. There are total 21 papers held in the exam and almost 15 papers were conducted in online mode for GATE 2013. But in GATE 2012 only 6 papers were held online and in 2011 just 4 papers, however there were exam conducted online before 2011.

As per the tender notice, GATE 2014 might be conducted for 21 papers in 12 sessions with 2 buffer sessions. Among these 21 papers, some will have multiple sessions, while for others there will be just one session. The examination will be held on 1st, 2nd, 15th and 16th February, 1st and 2nd March, 2013. The exam will be conducted in two phases from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. The authorities will soon declare the list of tentative cities where the exam will be conducted.