If you are planning to study engineering at a top institute in Maharashtra, you had better make sure that you do the two years of junior college through the state board.
Over 8,000 engineering aspirants who passed the ISC or CBSE exam have learned this lesson albeit a little too late. They missed out on admission after they were ranked lower than state board students on the merit list, even though they had scored similar marks in the exams.
The final list declared on Thursday by the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE), which supervises admissions to professional institutes, threw up this shocking list that has resulted in considerable discontent among students.
It seems that the DTE used a composite formula derived from the percentile of JEE (score) and the class 12 marks (physics, chemistry, math) with a 50-50 weightage.
An ISC student said: "I scored 270/300 in class 12 (PCM) which corresponds to a percentile of 87.34, while an HSC candidate scoring 270 marks got a percentile of 99.37 and a CBSE candidate got 91.14. This brought down my final score and ranking by 2,000 points."
The percentile gives a relative position of a candidate among those who took the exam. The number of ISC and CBSE candidates is far less than HSC candidates. But the number of high scorers are higher among ISC and CBSE candidates.
SK Mahajan, director of technical education, explained, "We have tried to do justice to all candidates through the percentile system, normalizing the marks across the boards."
He said he had received just eight complaints from among 4,700 CBSE candidates and nearly 3,500 ISC candidates seeking admission to engineering institutes.
Mahajan rejected the allegation of undue advantage to state board candidates saying, "The formula was set by the state government. A similar normalization method is used by CBSE for JEE (main) since last year. Gujarat is also following the same system."
Unsuccessful candidates have begun to do the rounds of private colleges, seeking admission through the management/minority quota.
Seema Agrawal, the mother of a CBSE student, says, "The state government has made it clear that if you want to get admission to a good engineering college don't study in CBSE or ISC schools."
Percentiles for a score of 270 (aggregate in PCM) on the DTE website
HSC: 99.37372291
CBSE: 91.14173080
ISC: 87.34185825
The composite score = 0.5 x JEE percentile (Jo) + 0.5 x board percentile (P)
JEE percentile (Jo) = Number of students who scored marks less than the candidate / total number of students who appeared for JEE (Main) 2014 Paper-1 *100
Board percentile (P) = Number of students who scored marks less than the candidate in the respective board exam 2014 / total number of students appeared for physics, chemistry and math in the respective board exam in March 2014 *100
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