IIT cut-off falls to 18% for SC/ST students

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A minimum of 35% is essential to be promoted to a higher class under almost every Indian school board or university. But you don't need that much to make it to some of the finest technological institutes in the country. On Saturday, when the Indian Institutes of Technology released report cards of students who joined these engineering schools this year, it transpired that the entry bar for the reserved category students had dropped to a mere 18% (89/480). The IITs were forced to make various concessions to fill SC/ST seats this year. Entry levels were lowered to half of what the last general category student who got through to the IITs scored. So, as the last general category student admitted to the IITs bagged an overall score of 178 (out of 480), the cut-off for an SC/ST student was brought down to 89 (half of 178). Till last year, the cut-off for SC/ST students used to be 60% of the score of the last general category student. But even this did not help the IITs fill up the quota seats. Close to 1,100 (of the 2,500 seats for reserved category students) had to be transferred to the preparatory programme, a year-long bridge course to equip these students for the IITs. All this makes a 1993 report by ex-IIT Madras director P V Indiresan and ex-IIT Delhi director N C Nigam "extremely relevant", say IIT faculty members. "Nearly 50% of the reserved seats remain vacant as SC/ST students are unable to secure the minimum threshold marks. Of those admitted, almost 25% are asked to leave due to poor performance," the 1993 report said. For general category students, though, little changed in JEE-2009 despite two more IITs opening their gates and the pool of seats going up. The qualifying score for them slipped marginally from 180 last year to 178 this time, IIT-Bombay JEE-2009 chairman Amiya Kumar Pani said. Subject-wise qualifying marks, however, climbed a few notches this year after the IITs altered the manner in which they computed cut-offs. The IITs arrived at the minimum subject-wise scores this year by taking an average of marks of all the candidates who sat for this competitive exam. IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barua justified the change in the methodology of drawing up qualifying scores by stating that for some years now, the IITs had been trying to arrive at a value that was "reasonable". "But subject-wise scores hardly matter as none of the students who get in have secured such low marks," explained IIT-Delhi JEE-2009 chairman R Chattopadhyay.