IIT Bombay wants 50,000 and not 1.5 lakh students to appear for JEE Advanced

IIT Bombay senate has approved the ‘compromise formula for JEE’ (a 2-tier exam and the 20 percentile board eligibility criteria). However,  it has objections on allowing 1.5 lakh students to appear for the final IIT entrance, i.e. advanced exam for JEE. The senate members, in a meeting on Wednesday recommended that the number of students appearing for JEE advanced be around 5 times the number of IIT seats, and not more.

Therefore, according to the suggestion,only the top 50,000 scorers of the main exam should be allowed to sit for the advanced paper, and not 1.5 lakh as suggested earlier by the IIT council.

According to sources, there might be two reasons behind this recommendation:

1. As NITs have decided to follow the 60% JEE Main + 40% board score formula, IITs don’t feel the need to screen so many students just for the 10000 odd IIT seats. Prof. Narasimhan, President of All India IIT Faculty Federation quoted, “There was a lot of debate on why 1.5 lakh students be screened for the advanced exam. Now that NITs are not part of the advanced exam, we suggested that the number should be less, essentially five times the number of seats, which comes around 50,000.”

2. Less number of examinees would allow flexibility to IITs for administering a subjective exam: According to sources, IITs are deliberating switching to a subjective pattern for JEE Advanced. In case of an objective exam, the evaluation of answer-sheets is computerized, which wouldn’t be possible in a subjective exam. It would be more convenient to evaluate 50000 subjective answer-sheets than 1.5 lakh as proposed earlier.

Highlights of the new JEE pattern proposal (the compromise formula) are:

1) Two exams, JEE Main and JEE Advanced.

2) 1.5 lakh top rank holders of JEE Main can appear for the advanced exam.

3) To be eligible for IITs, a student must be in the top 20 percentile bracket of his/her respective board (in terms of class XII scores).

IIT Bombay had met on Wednesday, July 25th, 2012 to discuss this compromise formula, where the suggestion to screen only 50000 students for the advanced exam was made. A similar meeting of IIT Kanpur senates is scheduled on July 28th. Also, even though IIT Bombay has accepted the pattern, the faculty and students are still against the idea, as was evident from the results of a poll.

A final decision would be taken by the Joint Admission Board in August.