The JEE ‘Top 20’ confusion!
The buzz around the novel JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) dates back to the year 2012 when the then HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal proposed to introduce a single common entrance exam for admission to premier engineering institutes across the country. Facing much opposition, the proposal was finally implemented and JEE, spread over two parts – Main and Advanced, was conducted on April 7 and June 2, 2013 respectively.
However, even after being successfully conducted, JEE maintains the air of confusion and allegations that came with it.
Confusion over JEE Advanced scores & Top 20 percentile criteria
The declaration of JEE Advanced scores and declaration of top 20 percentile eligibility cut-offs left students in a state of confusion. Many of the aspirants who qualified JEE Advanced, got provisional seats in IITs though online counseling, based on their JEE ranks. However, after the cut offs were released many students who were admitted to IITs found that they have not qualified the 20 percentile criterion. According to reports, around eighty students have been denied admission to IITs. Reports highlight that the maximum number of rejections are from IIT Madras (35) followed by IIT Kharagpur (17).
The new rule requires candidates who have successfully cleared the IIT-JEE (Advanced), to also be in the top 20 percentile of their class XII examination conducted by the respective education board, to be eligible for admission to the 16 IITs and NITs. Till last year the minimum eligibility was pegged at 60% marks in class XII board exams.
This being the case, Andhra Board students are the worst hit with the highest cutoffs of 91.8%, followed by Tamil Nadu (90.9%) and Kerala (85.2%).The lowest cutoffs are for Tripura (53.2%), Jharkhand (56.2%), Assam (56.6%) and Uttarakhand (57.8%). CBSE's cutoff is 81.6%, ICSE (83.2%), UP (73%), Bihar (65%) and West Bengal (61.2%). These cutoffs are for general category students.
In fact, AP students have decided to fight it out in the high court.
Students turn down IIT seat allotment
Around 769 students refused admission at one of the new IITs, leaving general category seats vacant after the first round of admission. The reason behind students backing out from admission is supposedly their "lack of confidence" in the new IITs and getting allotments in not-so-popular streams.
However, students who took admission got the benefit of internal betterment before the second allotment. As seat allotments refused by students in the first round got passed on to aspirants with lower ranking who opted for that subject in the preference form.
Reportedly hundreds of seats are available for students across categories. Seats are available in every IIT. Most vacancies are seen at ISM-Dhanbad, whereas, IIT-BHU does not have as many vacant seats this year.
