Hemali Chhapia, TNN_ The OBCs have sprung up in the performance charts. When close to 1.26 lakh brightest high school graduates took the JEE (advanced) on Sunday, it turned out that an almost similar number of open category students and OBC candidates were vying to get into the IITs.
Data shared by IIT-Delhi that is in-charge of conducting the JEE (advanced) shows that 51,170 general category students and 47,085 OBC candidates registered for the exam. Part of the reason for the dissolve in the caste divide is that several OBCs went on to do pretty well in the JEE (main) and did not use the reservation gates when they signed up for the advanced exam to join the IITs, said IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barua.
“A lot of the OBCs qualified under the general category,” said H C Gupta, chairman JEE advanced-2013. Experts now forecast that even in the final seat allotment, many OBCs may not need the special reservation to join the elite engineering colleges and may qualify under the open category. “We feel there are quite a few general category students who have dropped out and that may also be responsible in narrowing the number of OBC and general category students,” Barua added.
While the IITs had shortlisted a total of 1.5 lakh top candidates of the JEE-main, about 15%, “thousands who hail from Gujarat”, did not sign up for advanced as they preferred their state engineering college over the IITs, said Gupta. He estimated there were around 20,000 OBC candidates who hadn’t registered because they did not meet the OBC eligibility criteria.
Of those who took the exam on Sunday, students said the paper pattern was a bit different. “We had some new kinds of questions in the paper like matching lists which has never figured in the JEE,” Gupta added.
Coaching institutes that analysed the papers concurred that the physics questions were simple but math and chemistry were tougher and there was a sprinkling of challenging questions too. “In Chemistry, one question was interpreted differently in the Hindi question paper,” said Praveen Tyagi, founder of IITians Pace, a coaching academy. A total of 4,000 students sat for the JEE (Advanced) from 14 centres in Mumbai and its satellite town of Navi Mumbai. But of the 29,000-odd students from the IIT-Bombay zone, 12,000 took the test from Rajasthan, said Rajkumar Pant, vice chairman JEE-2013.
The JEE-Advanced was conducted in 95 cities across India and one overseas centre at UAE. This is the maiden year of this exam being conducted, after the change in the admission process by the MHRD. Of 1.2 million candidates who has registered for JEE-Main examination, only the top 1,50,000 students were eligible for taking JEE Advanced examination for admission to the 13 IITs and ISM-Dhanbad. Results of the exam will be out on June 23. After candidates clear the JEE-Advanced, they will be admitted to the IITs, provided they are within the top 20 percentile of students in their respective board.
There are 9,647 undergraduate seats in 15 IITs, IT-BHU and ISM Dhanbad while the number of undergraduate seats in the 30 NITs of the country is 15,678 including the seats in the new ones.
Curtsy Times of India