Wednesday, May 25, 2011

13,602


That's the number of 16-18 year-olds who learned today that they are actually world-class, a privilege that allows all of them (and actually goads some of them) to live a life filled with a sense of entitlement and utter disdain for mere mortals -- especially their teachers. The press release is here.

* * *

Some highlights:

  1. "A total number of 4,68,240 candidates appeared in JEE-2011 ... 13,602 candidates have been declared qualified to seek admission for 9618 seats in the IITs."

    Thus, about 3 percent of the candidates qualified. This figure is as high as ~5 percent for the Madras zone. I guess there's a lot of celebration at Hyderabad, which has probably overtaken Kota, Rajasthan, as the city of JEE dreams.

  2. "This year 108647 girls appeared for JEE-2011 out of which 1491 qualified."

    There are several ways to see this result. First, the fraction of girls who qualified is 1.4 %, which is less than half the overall figure of about 3 %. Second, and more tellingly, boys are about two-and-a-half times more likely to be among the rank-holders than girls (3.36 % for boys against 1.34 % for girls).

    Third, girls form about 11 percent of rank-holders, while their share among the exam-takers was 23%.

  3. In the OBC category, 138,104 took the exam, and 2700 qualified -- a ratio of about 2 %. A more relevant figure is the fraction of OBC students among the JEE-qualified: about 20%. While this figure is better than those of the previous two years (19% and 18%), it is still far short of the 27 percent supposedly set aside for them.

  4. In the SC category, 45172 students took the exam and 1966 qualified -- yielding a pretty fabulous (by JEE standards) ratio of 4.3%.

    This also means that the SC quota has been filled to the brim. This is the second time that this key mark of progress has been achieved.

  5. In the ST category, 766 students qualified out of 18125 -- for a ratio of 4.2 % which, while impressive, still doesn't allow them to fill all the available seats (mainly because their share in the group of exam-takers is low: 3.9 % which is about half as much as their quota.

  6. The PD category is special: over 19 % of the PD candidates qualified (440 out of 2286); since their number among exam-takers is small, this huge pass-through ratio is still not enough to enable them to fill all the available seats.

More later, when the IITs release detailed information.

4 Comments:

  1. Dheeraj Sanghi said...

    Because all students got 12 marks free, and in many other questions, multiple answers were considered correct, this has resulted in effectively lowering the cutoff for reserved category students. To explain this better, let us only consider the 12 free marks. If the cutoff without these 12 marks for general is 200, then SC/ST/PD cutoff would have been 100. Now, the cut-off becomes 212, but the SC/ST/PD cutoff is not 112, but 106. So effectively, everyone who got 94 without these 12 marks have been declared selected.

  2. Anonymous said...

    Abi,
    Coul you suggest any other way to select ~10,000 students from a group of ~500,000 applicants, for the best UG engg program we have in India? Doesn't it tell you that the demand for high quality UG engg education far exceeds the supply? Should the IITs choose to select students not merely by their test scores, but by their interests and their comprehensive academic record and their social status, how do you propose to do it? For the foreseeable future IIXs will remain the ultimate UG destination, as no private sector competitor can commandeer the resources necessary to offer a comparable technical education. We should not read too much into th eemergence of the new gen law schools and the ISB Hyderabad, as these do not require resources of the same scale - and frankly business education is a lot of hot air! The gap between the IITs and the rest is so vast and the government so determined to create IITs at the expense of existing local schools (for eg IIT-G instead of an upgraded Univ of G College of Sc and Tech; or an IIT-Hyd instead of an upgraded Osmania Univ College of Engg) that IITs will remain our preferred mode of delivering UG tech education. As for quotas the numbers don't say enough. All candidates are eligible for the open quota i.e., the 50% or say that is open, while OBCs are eligible to be admitted against the 50% OC + 27% BC, SCs in the additional quota available and STs similarly. We must also find out how many OBC/SC/ST have qualified in the OC category. In a state like TN the reservation system is all but a farce as it restricts the non-OBC/SC/ST to about 20% of the seats available while leaving the OBCs to compete for about 60% of the seats (OC+OBC). We must also identify the instances of fluid identity claim, which is by now another farcical gambit with more and more communities claiming OBC status

  3. Anonymous said...

    As always it is Rediff.com that trumps every "National (Notional?) Newspaper" in the land with its in depth reporting. http://preview.tinyurl.com/3sd8xzg

    "My sister and I used to give tuitions to small students to sustain the family before I got selected for Super 30. More than me, my mother must be very happy," he said, adding after doing his engineering, he would try for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) to help poor students like him through honest initiatives like Super 30."

    The IITs are one institution that those who aspire to enter the middle-class the old fashioned and predicable way - through hard work and honesty - still trust. Super 30 makes nonsense of the allegation that the JEE is biased against girls, or the socially and economically disadvantaged.

  4. Dheeraj Sanghi said...

    @jbeck, The allegation is that JEE is designed in a way that it requires a huge amount of coaching. That a good 12th class student without coaching finds it difficult to pass JEE. An admission process requiring huge amount of coaching is biased against girls in a culture where parents are unwilling to send girls for coaching in other cities, and sometimes unwilling to financially support such coaching. Of course, this allegation assumes that there exist admission processes (and entrance tests) which require less coaching.

    Super 30 to me proves that that allegation is correct, and given a good coaching, girls (and other disadvantaged students) can pass JEE, which they couldn't do otherwise. It proves that there is talent in the country, which JEE is not tapping into.