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Vellore Institute of Technology or VIT is one of the most sought-after colleges for students interested in engineering in India. While VIT also has a school of law (VIT-SOL) and also offers courses on sciences, commerce, humanities, management and design, I will focus on the Engineering college, as it is the most popular discipline.
VIT has 4 branches at the time of writing this article.
- VIT Vellore
- VIT Chennai
- VIT-AP at Amaravati
- VIT-Bhopal
Engineering Courses offered by VIT
VIT offers the following B.Tech courses.
- Biotechnology
- Civil engineering
- Chemical engineering
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Computer Science and Engineering with the following specialisations
- Bioinformatics
- Information Security
- Business Systems (in collaboration with TCS)
- Internet of Things
- Data science
- Blockchain Technology
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- Cyber Physical Systems
- Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
- Electrical and Electronics Engineering
- Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering
- Electronics and Communication Engineering
- Electronics and Communication Engineering with Specialisation in Biomedical Engineering
- Electronics and Computer Engineering
- Fashion Technology
- Information Technology
- Mechanical Engineering
- Mechanical Engineering with the following specialisations
- Manufacturing Engineering
- Electric Vehicles
- Mechatronics and Automation
All the above branches are not available at all the campuses. For courses offered at individual campus, please visit the official VIT Vellore (includes Chennai), VIT-AP and VIT-Bhopal websites.
Admission Mode for VIT
As per the college website, admission to the above courses at VIT are done via the VIT Engineering Entrance Exam or the VITEEE, which is usually conducted around the same time as JEE Mains.
The paper consists of questions in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics and guess what? There is no negative marking. That’s how it was till 2023 and we don’t know if it’s expected to change in future.
An honest review of VIT
Now, let me move to the most important part – review of VIT.
College
The college campus and the faculty are pretty good as per some of the students who have studied at VIT, especially the Vellore and Chennai campuses. Labs are very well equipped and research facilities are good.
One of the problems students face is the crowd. Though the seat matrix is not officially published, one news article reported that VIT Vellore has 2040 seats for Computer Science alone! If the other disciplines are added it may come to around 5000 seats at least. (This is probably an understatement, because unofficial information from a student in VIT has revealed that CSE + specializations alone have 6000 students🤐 )
The campus and hostels are super crowded and can have up to 8 students sharing one room. Some of these rooms were originally designed for 6 students and were converted into 8-sharing rooms to accommodate the increasing strength in the college.
While these are not important if you only care about the education, students do need some personal space and freedom of movement to enjoy their college life. Some of the students I talked to, reported that it’s difficult to even get a free bench to sit!
These are little things which don’t matter much, but can be a deciding factor when it comes to placements, which I will discuss next.
Placements
The college publishes the placement statistics without fail! After all, this is what every engineering aspirant wants – a dream offer before stepping out of college.
VIT boasts of super dream offers and dream offers on their placement page. It also mentions entering the Limca book of World records for placements. That’s not really great, considering they can even enter the Limca book of world records for the most number of CSE students.😂 Obviously, they will get a lot of placements in absolute numbers.
The placement page says that Microsoft has selected 7 students with 40L+ salaries. As per the current system, students of the Chennai campus are also clubbed with the Vellore campus students for placements. Even in computer science, you will have 2500+ students of Vellore campus and 1500+ students of Chennai campus sitting for placements together. Imagine competing with 3500 students for 7 offers by Microsoft. The probability of getting an offer (7/3500 = 0.002) is less than writing JEE Mains and getting a seat in an NIT in open category (25,000/10,00,000 = 0.025)! In fact, if you add electronics branches, the probability could be still less.
Bulk recruiters like TCS, Cognizant and Wipro do hire lots of candidates, but at much lower salaries (~6LPA). Gone are the days when entry-level salaries in IT companies were enough to support a family.
As per Economic Times, TCS is going to stop recruiting directly from a campus and all entry level hiring will be via their Smart Hiring process. This means you have to directly apply for jobs, irrespective of the college and VIT has no role to play here. You will compete with candidates from the whole country in an open recruitment process.
Non-transparent ranking system in VITEEE
The truth is, VIT’s admission process is shady! I have to use this word. The college may hit back at me, but if they can prove me wrong, officially, I will take down this post.
First, the entrance exam. While every other entrance exam has negative marking, VITEEE has no negative marks. This makes it very easy to score. When the results are declared, your marks are not revealed. you only get a rank. Not sure what prevents VIT from publicly declaring the marks along with the ranks.
There are multiple discussion forums on various social media channels where people discuss their marks and their performance. It is often seen that people getting ranks in the range of 30,000 in VITEEE get around 5,000 in similar entrance exams conducted by Manipal and SRM university. This leads us to wonder if the ranks are really continuous or filled with gaps. 🤔
Fee categories
The next controversial issue is their fee categories. The official website shows the fees to be around 1.95Lakh rupees for CSE course. But they add a ‘*’ saying it’s after concession. Any ethical college should publish the full fee instead of these concessional fees, which, in reality are offered to very few students.
Everyone who has attempted VITEEE or knows someone who has written VITEEE will be surely aware of the fee slabs or ‘categories’ in VIT. There are 5 categories in all. Under this scheme, students in category 1 get to pay almost 25% of the category 5.
While filling in your choices, you need to opt for both – branch and fee category. It is almost like a bidding system where someone who can afford 6 lakh rupees per year but getting a 20,000 rank and bid for a higher amount and get a CSE seat, while a person getting a 2,000 rank may not get CSE if they can afford only 2 lakh. This is literally an ‘open donation system’ and it proves that the VITEEE and its rankings are just an eyewash!
No sliding rule
Any good admission system allows students to ‘slide’ meaning if a student gets preference no 5 from their choices and preference no 4 falls vacant in subsequent rounds, they are allowed to slide up and get their more preferred choice. However, this is not possible in VIT.
If you bid and pay for category 5 in CSE and students in category 4, 3, 2, or 1 withdraw their seat, you don’t get to slide up and get a fee refund. You are stuck with your category 5!
Now what happens to this category 4, 3, 2, 1 seats which fall vacant? No one knows 😉 I am sure the reader can guess this! Do you think it’s fair?
Early admission, early class commencement
VIT will always hurry you up. Admissions are done well before JEE counselling starts. Those who are not sure if they’ll get a seat will invariably block a seat in VIT. VIT will start classes much before JEE counselling starts. For example, in 2022, classes commenced on Sep 12, whereas the first JEE (JoSAA) iteration was around Sep 23.
Students were forced to go to the campuses, join the hostel and start attending classes, knowing very well that they will have to leave if they get a seat in NITs or IITs, forgoing hostel fees and some part of the tuition fees.
Should you apply to VIT?
As a first choice, no. To be honest, it is not difficult to get a seat in VIT. With some marks and category 5 fees, even an average to below average student can get into VIT as the number of seats is huge. Getting into Bhopal and Amaravati are even more easy. Doing a B.Tech in VIT is really not something to boast of or something to feel proud about. Manipal probably scores higher than VIT in the admission process, sliding, fee structure, ranking transparency etc.
VIT has been ranked above colleges like NIT Surathkal, NIT Warangal and BITS Pilani as per the NIRF Ratings 2023. These rankings are not to be trusted at all, because they have several parameters that may defy logic and a college can get ranked high by manipulating a few parameters, for example research papers released. VIT has a high number of research papers released every year, but then the number of students is also very high. Obviously they will be able to get more papers produced than say a BITS Pilani or IIT BHU which has far less number of students. Therefore please do not go by NIRF rankings.
If you don’t care about the college brand, not worried about paying more fees than someone who got a worse rank than you, if are willing to study hard and compete with 10,000 people for placements, and live in a hostel room with 7 people in the heat of Vellore or Chennai, wish you all the best. This place will teach you some life skills for sure. And 2 years after you grab a job offer, no one is going to ask you where you studied. It’s what you do with your life that matters😃
As for the college, I personally have no respect for this place, until they rectify their admission processes and make it fair and transparent. Mentioning full (category 5) fee openly on their website is a first step.
You may also read our review of other colleges:
Manipal Institute of Technology
