Bombay zone wins IIT-JEE race

Neither high cut-off marks nor errors in the papers stopped a record number of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) aspirants from making it to the 16 premier institutes this year. Despite a near-6% rise in this year’s cut-off marks, more students have cracked the Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) 2011 than ever before. The results of the exam were declared at 8am on Wednesday.

Even though the cut-off marks soared high this year to 229, as compared to 190 last year, 13,602 candidates have been successful in cracking the IIT-JEE exams 2011. There were 4,68,240 candidates who took the IIT-JEE exam this year, as opposed to 4.5 lakh last year, when only 12, 676 students had qualified.

Experts attribute the high pass percentage to an increase in the number of seats and improvement in student performance. “The improved performance can be attributed to the fact that average scores  have gone up, since many students have scored well.

Also, the number of seats has been increased from 9,509 last year to 9,600 and above,” said Avijeet Chatterji, chairman of IIT-JEE from IIT-Bombay.

Bombay zone aces test
The Bombay zone can once again boast of the maximum number of qualified candidates at 3,336, followed by Madras (3,126) and Delhi (2,138) zones.

While 22  candidates from the Bombay zone figured in the top 100 merit list last year,  this year, the number has shot up to 35. In the top 500, 145 are from the Bombay zone.

“Such numbers fluctuate. It depends on how serious the students are from a particular zone. Another reason could be that Kota (in the Bombay zone) is the hub of IIT-JEE coaching classes and that has boosted performance,” said Lokesh Khandelwal, founder-director, Resonance Coaching Classes.

Respite for the disabled
While last year, physically challenged candidates had to travel to Delhi for a medical check-up, this year, medical boards have been set up in IIT-Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Guwahati and IIT-Madras.

For the preparatory course, 112 scheduled tribe (ST) candidates and 294 physical disability (PD) candidates have qualified. This year, for the second time, there will be no SC preparatory list as the number of successful SC candidates is more than the available SC seats.

Girls catch up
This year, 1,491 out of 1,08,647 girls qualified in IIT-JEE. In fact, to encourage more girls to try out for IITs, the institutes are mulling over a waiver of application fees for female candidates. “Earlier, we had discounted rates of Rs500 for the application forms for girls, while boys had to pay Rs1000 per form. This year, we are thinking about giving it to them free of cost,” said Chatterji.

Students face high stakes
There will be two rounds of admission. Students will have to compete for roughly 9,800 seats available across all the IITs, IT-BHU (Varanasi) and ISMU-Dhanbad. Of these, around 15% seats are reserved for other backward classes (OBCs), another 15% for scheduled castes (SC) and 7% for the scheduled tribes (STs).

To improve transparency in the evaluation process, for the first time in the history of IIT-JEE, the scanned images of the objective response sheets (answer scripts) will be accessible to candidates on the JEE website starting May 27, 2011.