The newly introduced ‘percentile’ system for admissions into IITs has led to a complete mess due to the difference in calculations by State Secondary Boards and IITs.
The States erred in calculating the percentile based on the total number of students appeared in Class XII Board exams in contrary to the notification by IITs which pointed number of students finally passed in the respective Class XII boards results.
lack of proper communication by Joint Admission Board (JAB), IIT, to the school secondary boards is said to be the reason behind the goof-up that has affected scores of IIT aspirants. For instance, if Boards calculated the percentile for all the students who appeared in Class XII exams, the IITs did it only for those who passed out.
A meeting chaired by HRD Minister MM Pallam Raju to clear the air and find a solution failed to arrive at a conclusion on Wednesday as only IIT Delhi Director K Shevgaonkar could attend it. The meeting came in the wake of complaints from students and parents about confusions in the admission under the new format.
Following the meeting, the HRD Minister said such kind of discrepancy is likely to be a reason which could have deprived some students from taking admissions to IITs even if they secured good ranks in JEE (Advanced).
“Am told that many States which include Andhra Pradesh have made incompatible calculations in regards to the one notified by IITs. The top 20 percentile was calculated by some of the State boards based on the number of students who appeared in the Class XII examinations, whereas it should have in fact been on the basis of total number of students who passed the board exam,” Raju said.
The first casualty was reported from AP where a student who after scoring a very decent rank and after reserving a seat at IIT Kharagpur, was found ineligible to be admitted to IITs.
Admission to 16 IITs, under the new two-tier format introduced by then HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, is based on the performance in JEE (Advanced) after coming into top 1.5 lakh of JEE (Mains) Entrance. But only those candidates will make into the prestigious chain of engineering institutes who have done well in Class XII results and also fall in the bracket of top 20 percentile of Class XII examination conducted by various State boards, CBSE, ICSE etc.
IIT aspirants from Andhra Pradesh are reported to have been the worst hit, where the cut-off marks for top 20 percentile of successful candidates in the General category declared by the Board was 459 out of 500 (91.8 %) followed by Tamil Nadu (90.9%), Kerala (85.2%) and the lowest cuto-ffs are for Tripura (53.2%), Jharkhand (56.2%), Assam (56.6%), Uttarakhand (57.8%), CBSE (81.6%), ICSE (83.2%), UP (73%), Bihar (65%), West Bengal (61.2%).
Raju avoided to comment on who should to be reprimanded on reasons for the difference in calculations but said the Ministry will look into how and on what basis students were affected and how can they be helped. The Ministry will shortly call another round of meeting for more clarifications on the matter and deliberate the “future” of the newly introduced system. Raju said, “The present system was adopted as per the wisdom of the IIT council and it’s for them to see what is fair and what is not.”