IIT Kharagpur Bars Students from Mentioning Departmental Ranks in Placements CVs, Cites Fairness and Stress Concerns

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur has barred B.Tech students from listing departmental ranks in placement CVs, aiming to reduce stress and ensure fairer recruitment.

The students of Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur received an unexpected guideline from the institute: don’t mention your departmental rank in CVs, when the placement season commenced this month at IIT Kharagpur. The directive, issued just before the latest round of campus recruitments, aims to curb unhealthy competition and ensure a level playing field for all candidates.

As a practice, IIT students highlight their rank within their department—like 2nd out of 120 or 10th out of 80—as a way of signalling academic merit. However, it has been observed that this practice has also been linked to anxiety, peer pressure, and even discrimination during interviews. Recruiters during interview, consciously or not, may give preference to higher-ranked students despite similar CGPAs, leaving others disadvantaged, as reported by ToI.

The directive has comes at a time when placements across IITs are drawing wider scrutiny. At IIT Delhi, Phase 1 of 2024–25 placements saw over 1,200 offers—including 50 international. while at IIT Bombay reported that nearly 36% of its students remained unplaced last year despite a 75% overall placement rate. A parliamentary panel recently flagged “unusual decline” in placement percentages at premier campuses between 2021–22 and 2023–24.

By asking students to stick to their CGPA as the sole academic indicator, IIT Kharagpur hopes to shift focus from intra-department rivalries to overall performance. “This decision takes away the burden of constantly being compared. We can now walk into interviews knowing we’re judged fairly,” said a fourth-year student preparing for placement interviews.

IIT KGP’s change in placement policy is likely to set an example for other engineering institutes in the country. As per its faculty members, by discouraging a culture of numerical comparison, the institute is signalling that mental well-being and fairness are as important as academic performance.

Whether other IITs and leading engg institutes adopt a similar stance remains to be seen, but for students facing one of the most stressful times of their academic life, the institute order is already a small relief.

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