Friday, October 12, 2012

IF YOU ARE CONFIDENT OF CLEARING IIT JEE(NOW MAIN AND ADVANCE BOTH) Don't Bother About 12th score

Well what we always have seen and believed and reminded our students that if you are going to clear IIT JEE you are sure to perform well in boards also. With introduction of XII marks as an eligibility criterion from JEE 2013 still I feel for good students there's no need of worry on that account. To confirm my belief I want to share with you an interesting article being written by Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi of IIT KANPUR. Read it below its a very nice compilation
There has been a lot of debate about eligibility of students getting admission to IITs, whether it should stay at 60 percent, may be go up slightly, say 65%, or should it become 80 percentile, or may be a slightly lower percentile. But all this has been without any data on what would be the impact of any of these eligibility conditions on the selected students.

So, I got the data of 12th class performance of all JEE admitted students this year to IIT Kanpur, and tried to analyze it. Of course, we will not know the impact of 60% eligibility, since those who get less marks than that, perhaps don't even go for counseling, and most likely would not take admission, knowing fully well that they have to submit their mark-sheet by 30th September. But JEE office informally tells me that such students are very rare.

Since COBSE has announced percentage marks equivalent to 80 percentile only for General Category students, we looked at only those students marks in the 12th class. Since 80 percentile was given only for 2012, we have assumed that the marks would have been same in 2011 as well.

Out of 398 General Category students, 14 students would not have been eligible for admission to IITs. That is 3.5 percent.

And one may note that the current COBSE list is based on 80 percentile of all students registered for the 12th class board exam in that particular board. It has already been pointed out that the IIT Council decision was to consider 80 percentile of only successful students. It means that the cut-offs of eligibility in different boards would be higher by at least one percent, and a few more students would be then ineligible, say 4 percent. This is not a small number. Assuming that a similar fraction would be seen in SC/ST/PD/OBC candidates as well, we are talking about making 400 odd candidates (out of 10,000) ineligible for admission to IITs after they have performed well in JEE Mains and JEE Advanced.

I have said in an earlier blog that in the transition year, instead of doing too many changes at once, we should bring in changes slowly, and in particularly argued that a scheme which makes just 1 percent of candidates ineligible would put strong enough pressure to take schooling seriously. I have also argued that in view of lack of data on comparison between different boards, even if IITs want to change the eligibility condition to percentile format, it should be kept low at 70 percentile in the transition year. Well, it so happens, that if we look at the percentage marks corresponding to 70 percentile, and then see how many students would not have made it to IIT system, it would have been 4 out of 398, just one percent.

Another interesting point to note is that out of 14 students identified as below 80 percentile, 12 are from CBSE and 2 from Andhra Board. Now, we all know that CBSE board is much tougher than state boards. The standard of education is much higher, and  there is more than enough evidence to show that 80 percentile of CBSE actually has a much better academic preparation than 80 percentile in many state boards. We are just waiting for these 12 students to go to court next year.

Of course, there are too many variables that we don't know. What happens to the reserved category students. Is the statistics similar at other IITs (no reason to believe that it will be different). Because of additional coaching of 12th class this year, would most students getting through JEE advanced will also get 80+ percentile scores, or will because of additional coaching of 12th class this year, the 80 percentile cutoff will increase and there will be more students who would have been selected in JEE Advanced, but would be deemed ineligible.

Only time will tell how much chaos is waiting to happen in June-July 2013.

Added on 11th October: 

More data and interesting observations:

Out of 398 students whose data I have, 296 are from CBSE (74%), 76 are state boards (19%), 25 are from ICSE (6%), and one student from another board.

The distribution of percentile is more interesting. In CBSE, out of 296, 252 have 90+ percentile, 33 have 80-90 percentile, 9 have 70-80 percentile, and 3 have less than 70 percentile. In case of state boards, pretty much all students of all states have 90+ percentile, except AP board, where 2 students are in 80-90 range, 1 student in 70-80 range, and 1 student has less than 70 percentile. In ICSE board also, 24 out of 25 have 90+ percentile, and only one student is in 80-90 percentile.

What this means is that a student who can pass JEE with a top-5000 general category rank does not have to bother about getting 80 percentile in a state board at all, in fact, not even 90 percentile. But a CBSE student who can pass JEE with a top-5000 general category rank still has to worry about clearing the 80 percentile hurdle.

This also means that if students want higher percentile, they should leave CBSE board schools and join state board schools. This will not only help them in focusing on JEE and not worry abut 80 percentile at all, but it will also help them in getting higher ranks for NITs, where the percentile score is being included in the ranking.

What an interesting idea sir jee?
To improve the quality of school education, you incentivise people to leave better schools and better boards.


P.S. A similar article has now been published in INDIAN EXPRESS
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/focus-on-class-xii-in-jee-may-have-missed-point-iit-entrants-already-school-toppers/1018366/

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