Drawing flak over the controversial eligibility criteria for admissions to IITs, the Government is considering relaxing the percentile system. The HRD Ministry has asked the Joint Admission Board (JAB) of IITs, the apex body for IIT admissions, to decide on selection norms to clear the prevailing confusion before aspirants get ready for the 2014 entrance test.
The crucial JAB meet is scheduled for Monday which comes soon after the August 14 review meeting conducted by HRD Minister MM Pallam Raju on the issue. The new two-tier IIT entrance test introduced by Kapil Sibal led to controversies and legal tangles. Incidentally, students from the HRD Minister’s home turf were worst affected by this pattern. For instance, this year, students scoring 91% from Andhra Pradesh were not eligible for IIT-JEE (Advanced) as they did not fall within the top 20th percentile.
HRD Ministry sources said the eligibility cut-off is expected to be revised upward. In the 2013 two-tier JEE, the eligibility norm was that a candidate has to be in the top 20th percentile in their secondary examination to get into an IIT. The JAB may relax the 2014 IIT-JEE (Advanced) norms with fixed eligibility cut-off (say between 70 % and 80%). Even in the old format till year 2012, JEE cut-off was 60%.
Another possibility open to the JAB is that low scoring school boards like Bihar, West Bengal and UP can continue to adhere to the top 20th percentile as others, like AP, Kerala, can adopt the cut-off mark (70-80 per cent) criterion. Raju has already reviewed the system on August 14 in the presence of top HRD, IIT and CBSE officials.
The review meeting had also discussed to stick to the multiple choice format of IIT-JEE, introduced in 2005-06. A two-tier common engineering admission test for entry into all Central Government-funded technical institutes (CFTIs) was announced for the 2013 JEE. The first part, called JEE-Main, was conducted for selecting students to all the CFTIs except the IITs. The JEE-Main adopted ranking with 40% weightage to the secondary examination results and 60% to the entrance examination.
The top 1.5 lakh rank holders of JEE-Main took the second part known as Advanced and they had to be in the top 20th percentile to get into IIT. But irony surfaced when many students found that though they qualified Advanced but did not fall in the top 20th percentile.