IITs to lower cutoff mark
The move comes after a drastic fall in the number of students qualifying for admission to the IITs
NEW DELHI: A day after the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) decided against lowering the cutoff mark for admission, the human resource development (HRD) ministry pushed them to do so to accommodate adequate number of students from reserved categories in the undergraduate courses of the institutes.
The move comes after a drastic fall in the number of students qualifying for admission to IITs. This year, 18,138 students qualified the Joint Entrance Exam Advanced (JEE-Advanced) for entry into undergraduate courses at IITs, compared with the 50,455 students who had qualified last year.
The number of candidates who qualify should ideally be twice the number of available seats at IITs to ensure that all the seats are filled. This year, however, the number who qualified were 1.65 times the available seats.
“Responding to requests from students & IIT Community & to proactively ensure that all reservation seats are duly filled, I have directed @IITKanpur conducting JEE (advanced) to make available candidates, strictly as per merit, twice the number of seats in each category. If necessary by releasing a supplementary list,” HRD minister Prakash Javadekar tweeted on Thursday.
The HRD ministry then released a statement underlining that the IITs have revised the merit list and a detailed notice will be issued showing the qualification of 31,980 students up from the 18,138 qualified in the results announced on 10 June. This is the first time since IIT-JEE was revamped six years ago that IITs have revised the merit list after announcing the result. The move is significant as IITs consider their entrance examination sacrosanct and believe that there should be no compromise on quality in selecting students.
Students from the extended merit list can start filing up their course options with others, the statement from the HRD ministry said quoiting a fresh joint admission board (JAB) meeting of the IITs.
According to the fresh list, now 6,964 OBC candidates have qualified the JEE Advanced, against 3,140 in the original list. Similarly, 5480 scheduled caste candidates have now qualified, which is 771 more than the previous list
India has 23 IITs. A professor of an older IIT said requesting anonymity that the ministry pushed them to redraw the merit list to accommodate more quota students, but this will “set a bad precedent. If IITs are the best in the country, a lot of credit for that goes to the quality student intake”.
In 2015, IIT Bombay, which was organising IIT for JEE Advanced that year had lowered the qualification slightly to allow more intake but this was done before the declaration of the result.
THE NUMBER OF QUALIFYING CANDIDATES SHOULD IDEALLY BE TWICE THE NUMBER OF AVAILABLE SEATS AT IITS