New Delhi: The Ministry of Education is coming up with a new platform, SATHEE (Self Assessment Test and Help for Entrance Exams), for students preparing for engineering and medical entrance exams.
SATHEE, which is the Hindi word for companion, will be a platform where medical and engineering aspirants will be taught and mentored free of cost by faculty and students from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan was to launch the platform Monday, but it was postponed to an undecided date, sources in the ministry informed ThePrint.
SATHEE is a platform designed by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. The platform includes more than 800 videos in 12 regional languages and assessments with thousands of questions, IIT-Kanpur director Abhay Karandikar had itweeted.
He added that it would also have regular mock tests to help prepare students for all India competitive exams in addition to mentorship sessions by IIT and AIIMS students who will act like SATHEES (companions).
“The learning platform contains video-lectures, previous years’ problems, NCERT material, exemplar problems, old JEE/NEET problems, notes from IIT students, and other reference material to help aspirants in their preparation all the while under the watchful guidance of student mentors from IIT and AIIMS to lead them along the long way of preparing competitively. The platform has an Artificial Intelligence enabled dashboard,” he wrote.
Karandikar added that the platform was developed by Prof. Amey Karkare from Department of Computer Science at IIT-Kanpur, leveraging Machine Learning and AI.
SATHEE will be the second such initiative by the government to provide free of cost coaching for entrance exams to students. Currently, there is a similar platform called IIT-Pal or Professor Assisted Learning, which has free videos and tutorials for students. It has video lectures in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology syllabus topics of NCERT Class 11 and Class12.
The difference between IIT Pal and SATHEE is that the latter will also have students from IITs and AIIMS mentoring students so that they can learn from their experiences.
“The idea behind both SATHEE and IIT-Pal has been to simplify the process of entrance exam preparation and prevent students from wasting their money and time in coaching classes. The coaching industry has completely eaten up the education system and we are simply trying to combat it,” said an official in the education ministry.
The National Testing Agency conducts the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) for admissions to engineering and medical colleges. Last year, more than 17 lakh candidates had appeared for the NEET. Over 8 lakh candidates sat for the JEE Main 2023 January session exam.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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