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Less meritorious students slip into IITs
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 16 October 2008, 00:23 IST |
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New Delhi: Below average students are now easily getting seats in IITs. In 2007, one made through the IIT joint entrance examination with a score of 15 percent in mathematics and won a seat at IIT Kanpur, while in 2008, students could join IIT-Kharagpur with a much lower score of five percent in physics.
What opened doors of IITs for less meritorious students was a 2007 procedure, which effected a reduction of subject cutoffs to single digits.
This go against the seemingly reassuring statistics put out by IIT-Roorkee on its website in August stating that in the 2008 JEE conducted by it, the marks obtained by the last admitted candidate in the general category were 63 out of 162 in maths (39 percent), 72 in physics (44 percent) and 45 in chemistry (28 percent).
The website glossed over the fact that some of the admitted candidates who obtained higher aggregates (and, therefore, higher ranks) actually scored much lower marks in one or the other subject than those scored by the last admitted candidate.
The lowest marks in individual subjects among the candidates admitted to IITs this year are 10 in maths (6 percent), 8 in physics (5 percent) and 15 in chemistry (9 percent), an RTI query has revealed.
Several anomalies have come to light because of the data disclosed by IIT-Roorkee in response to the RTI application from a computer sciences professor in IIT Kharagpur namely Rajeev Kumar.
The 2007 procedure followed IIT Kharagpur's embarrassment before the Central Information Commission because of its inability to explain the basis for the much higher subject cutoffs in the previous year's JEE. Adopted as it was on the rebound, the 2007 procedure adopting 20 percentile as subject cutoffs has turned out to be imprudent.
Source:The Economic Times (Authored by Manoj Mitta)
