City’s worst show in JEE Advanced in three years

LUCKNOW: The state capital’s students could not secure high ranks in JEE Advanced, this year. Lucknow’s high scorer Utkarsh Gupta bagged all India rank (AIR) 431 with a score of 237 out of 360, making it the city’s worst show in the past three years. In fact, Lucknow slipped way behind Kanpur this time.

Kanpur’s high scorer Ishanh Misra bagged AIR 324 with a score of 245 out of 360. Just last year, the JEE Advanced topper from the state capital, Aman Tewari, bagged AIR 256 with 291 marks out of 366. The year before that, in 2016, the city put up its best show with Divyanshu Saxena bagging AIR 64 and being declared the second topper in the Kanpur zone.

This below par performance is hard to belive, as the city students dominated the ISC Class 12 merit list. Out of the top 49 students who made it to the top three positions, 18 belonged to Lucknow.

Likewise, Uttar Pradesh students dominated the CBSE Class 12 merit list. Two UP girls from the humanities stream notched the first and the second rank, said a CBSE official. And out of the seven students who shared the third spot, four hailed from UP -two from Ghaziabad and one each from Noida and Meerut.

In the UP Board Class 12 examinations too, students came through with flying colours.

Author and national level award winning teacher Dheeraj Mehrotra said, “Toppers from the city have taken a fall from AIR 64 in 2016, to AIR 256 in 2017 and finally AIR 431 in this year’s JEE Advanced. The downfall in ranking over the past few years is huge. The obvious reason is lesser effort by schools towards competitive examinations.”

Chairman of GD Goenka Public School Sarvesh Goel also admitted that it was strange that not a single city student could make it to the top 250, despite many of them “scoring so well in ISC and CBSE examinations”.

In its press statement, the City Montessori School claimed that 80 CMS students had cleared JEE Advanced in 2017, while 85 students had cleared the examination in 2016. Notably, the school did not mention the number of students who cracked the entrance test this year. CMS alumna Muskan Agarwal, who cracked the exam in her second attempt this year, said that the paper was difficult. She bagged AIR 1,730, scoring 196 out of 360, with 100 in physics, 49 in chemistry and 47 in mathematics.

She said she was keeping her fingers crossed and hoping for admission in her “dream college IIT Mumbai”. “I aspire to eventually get into the civil services. This (getting into IIT) is my grandfather Anand Kumar Agarwal’s wish. I am looking forward to realising his dreams,” she said.

›

The downfall in ranking over the past few years is huge. The obvious reason is lesser effort by schools towards competitive examinations. DHEERAJ MEHROTRA, teacher