The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur will conduct the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) this year. GATE 2021 had been organised by IIT Bombay and the institute transferred the responsibility to IIT-KGP this year.
Subhasis Chaudhri, director of IIT Bombay, handed over the chairmanship of NCB-GATE 2022 to Virendra Singh Tewari, director of IIT KGP. In GATE 2021, a total of 8,82,684 candidates had applied which is a slight increase from 8.59 lakh applications last year. A total of 14,196 students had applied for newly introduced humanities subjects. This is more than the number of applications in nine existing subjects out of 27 papers. The least opted for paper in 2021 was statistics while the most opted paper remains mechanical engineering.
Among humanities, most applicants — 8,634 — were females. Overall, the number of female applicants exam also saw a rise. A total of 2,88,379 female students had applied for GATE 2021. This was an increase of about 10,000 from last year.
Last year, IIT-Bombay had relaxed the eligibility criteria to allow third-year students to take the exam as well. Earlier, the eligibility was limited to graduates or fourth-year students only.
Deepankar Choudhury, organising chairman of GATE 2021 had told the media, "Due to the pandemic, several university exams could not take place and in the others, results were delayed. This led to a lot of confusion among the batch of 2020 who were not sure if they are now in the fourth year or in the third year as final exam results are not out yet. By relaxing the eligibility criteria, we have tried to lessen their worries."
