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Academics

The IITs receive comparatively higher grants than other engineering colleges in India. While the total government funding to most other engineering colleges is around ₹ 100–200 million ($ 2 – 4 million) per year, the amount varies between ₹ 900–1300 million ($ 19 – 27 million) per year for each IIT. Other sources of funds include student fees and research funding from industry and contributions from the alumni. The faculty-to-student ratio in the IITs is between 1:6 and 1:8. The Standing Committee of IIT Council (SCIC) prescribes the lower limit for faculty-to-student ratio as 1:9, applied department wise. The IITs subsidize undergraduate student fees by approximately 80% and provide scholarships to all Master of Technology students and Research Scholars (PhD) to encourage students for higher studies, per the recommendations of the Thacker Committee (1959–1961). The cost borne by undergraduate students is around ₹180,000 per year. Students from the OBC, ST, SC categories, female students as well as physically challenged students are also entitled to scholarships.

The various IITs function autonomously, and their special status as Institutes of National Importance facilitates the smooth running of IITs, virtually free from both regional as well as student politics. Such autonomy means that IITs can create their curricula and adapt rapidly to the changes in educational requirements, free from bureaucratic hurdles. The government has no direct control over internal policy decisions of IITs (like faculty recruitment and curricula) but has representation on the IIT Council. The medium of instruction in all IITs is English. The electronic libraries allow students to access online journals and periodicals. The IITs and IISc, Bengaluru have taken an initiative along with Ministry of Education to provide free online videos of actual lectures of different disciplines under National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. This initiative is undertaken to make quality education accessible to all students.

The academic policies of each IIT are decided by its Senate. This comprises all professors of the IIT and student representatives. Unlike many Western universities that have an elected senate, the IITs have an academic senate. It controls and approves the curriculum, courses, examinations and results, and appoints committees to look into specific academic matters. The teaching, training and research activities of the institute are periodically reviewed by the senate to maintain educational standards. The Director of an IIT is the ex-officio Chairman of the Senate.

All the IITs follow the credits system of performance evaluation, with proportional weighting of courses based on their importance. The total marks (usually out of 100) form the basis of grades, with a grade value (out of 10) assigned to a range of marks. Sometimes, relative grading is done considering the overall performance of the whole class. For each semester, the students are graded on a scale of 0 to 10 based on their performance, by taking a weighted average of the grade points from all the courses, with their respective credit points. Each semester evaluation is done independently and then the weighted average over all semesters is used to calculate the cumulative Grade Point Average (known as CGPA or CPI—Cumulative Performance Index).