Foreign students wanting to study at any Indian institution will now have to write a common entrance test on the lines of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) used in the US and Canada.
The test, to be known as InSAT, will be conducted from next year, said senior officials in the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD).
The modalities of the test are still being worked out, and the ministry is consulting with the universities. According to the All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE), India currently hosts about 54,000 international students, but HRD ministry sources said there is some anomaly between other ministries’ data and theirs, reports The Print.
InSAT will be an online aptitude test that will test basic knowledge of students, including verbal, analytical and quantitative reasoning. The scores will be used as a qualification for getting admission to Indian universities. Until now, students had to write individual entrance tests for each university they sought admission in.
“A common aptitude test like InSAT is being brought in because so far there are many anomalies in the foreign student admissions. Every institute is doing the admissions in their own way, and hence we are not able to keep a uniform data of the students. With a common entrance test, things will become more uniform,” said a senior HRD ministry official.
A common entrance test is a norm for admission in the US, Canada, UK and some Asian countries. The GRE is the most common such test, accepted by all universities in the US and Canada, some in the UK and some universities in Singapore as well.
InSAT will initially be conducted in the 30 countries that India is targeting under the “Study in India” programme, including Nepal, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Thailand, Malaysia, Egypt, Kuwait, Iran, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Rwanda. Moving forward, the government plans to make it more prominent in the foreign students’ admission process.