Applications for IITs see low five per cent rise

Updated on: Thursday, December 23, 2010

The surging wave of applications for the entrance examination to enter the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) seems to have ebbed this year, with the number of forms submitted going up by a measly 5 per cent.

At the end of the deadline for sending in the JEE 2011 forms on Monday, the 15 IITs have recorded a total of 4.8 lakh aspirants who will take the competitive exam on April 10, 2011. Officials at the JEE offices, spread across the seven old IITs, said last-minute applications were still being mailed to them and the final number was likely to touch a little more than 5 lakh.

That will hike the percentage rise in applications to 10, but the figure will still be lower than previous years. For the 2010 exam, there was a 20 per cent increase in the number of applicants than 2009. In fact, JEE 2011 is likely to see the smallest growth in any two corresponding years.

Bombay zone sees highest increase in applications
Though the all-India count may be disappointing, the Bombay zone, comprising Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Goa, Gujarat and north of Karnataka, saw the highest rise in the number of applicants. “It’s 84,000 and still counting,” said IIT-B JEE 2011 chairman A Chatterjee. In 2010, the figure was 76,771. the Bombay zone received 76,771 applications.

This is followed by the Kanpur zone, which is in charge of organizing JEE 2011. As Sounak K Choudhury, Chairman, JEE 2011 from IIT Kanpur, said, “We have received 81,970 applications to date.” But numbers are likely to go up a bit, as G B Reddy of IIT-Delhi said, “We are still receiving applications that were posted on Monday.” Incidentally, though the IITs have started an online facility for submitting applications, there were not too many takers.

The 2011 exam is likely to be the last edition of the test as we know it. A committee, headed by secretary of science and technology department T Ramaswamy, will decide the future of the JEE. It will be up to the panel to decide whether to scrap the test and conduct a single entrance exam for all tech colleges in the country or to follow Damodar Acharya committee’s recommendation of selecting students following a series screening: their Std XII scores, a national aptitude test and then a JEE for the IITs.

But whichever way the Ramaswamy report goes, the faculty believe that the IIT test will change permanently in the composition. “With the implementation of the core science curriculum in all high schools across the country, we are likely to see a larger share of state board students take the JEE. Currently, the test is dominated by CBSE students,” said an IIT director.

What is not likely to change for some time is the place that the IITs enjoy today. Apart from the glorious past, experts said because of the sub-standard quality of education in hundreds of engineering colleges of India, lakhs of 18-year-olds dream of stepping into the institutes’ ‘hallowed grounds’.

Looking Back

Before the JEE , the basis IITs used to admit students was the Common admit Entrance Examination (CEE). At that time, there were only four IITs with a total student intake of 700. Nearly 15,000 candidates used to take the CEE and and the format of the test included long answers and problem solving questions. Answer scripts were evaluated manually. In the early 60s, the name of the exam was changed to JEE.

As the number of examinees grew, a two-stage JEE—a screening test, followed by a main paper—was introduced in 2000. Then came the single-day test where the aspirant has to take one exam and answer a mixed bag of questions in physics, chemistry and mathematics.

Applications for IITs see low five per cent rise

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