The fall in the number of the successful candidate in JEE Advanced touched a seven-year low this year. This made the IITs to call a meeting and discuss if there are enough candidates to fill the seats.
In 2013, IIT-JEE was renamed as JEE Advanced and along with this, the eligibility criteria for the exam was also tweaked. In previous years, the numbers of candidates qualifying the exam have always been at least twice the number of seats on offer. But this year, the candidates are only 1.6 times the available seats.
This number (qualified candidates) is the smallest since 2012.
“There is a feeling that we may be on the razor edge. Some institutes have expressed concerns, which is why a meeting of the JAB (Joint Admission Board) has been called tomorrow (Wednesday) morning to discuss this and, if needed, think of a solution. It is in the interest of students that none of the seats goes vacant,” said a member of the IIT-JAB.
According to the sources, lowering the cut-offs of the exam may not be an option to accommodate more students as the results have been announced.
In 2015, the cut-offs were lowered to accommodate enough number of aspirants but this was done before declaring the results to the public.
Apart from a low number of candidates crossing the cut-offs, the institutes are also worried about the numbers of the female candidates on the merit list, which is only 2076 and this is the lowest in seven years.
This year, IITs have also added 800 supernumerary seats for the female candidates in order to improve the gender ration on the campus.
“The women, our experience over the last few admission cycles has shown, are usually a little inflexible in filling up choices (of institutes and seats). If cut-offs cannot be lowered, then candidates, especially women, will have to encourage to fill as many choices as they can to ensure they are accommodated and seats donʼt fall vacant,” said another member of IIT-JAB.
“The purpose of creating supernumerary seats for women to improve the gender ratio (on campus) may be defeated in the absence of separate cut-offs for female candidates. The IITs should have ideally announced a (separate) cut-off for five to 10 percentage points lower than the qualifying marks for the corresponding categories. With the current pool of roughly 2,000 women, itʼs very unlikely they will be able to fill up all 800 supernumerary seats,”said professor Dheeraj Sanghi, who teaches computer science at IIT-Kanpur.