1st time, 2nd round of IIT admissions

Govt Asks Institutes To Lower Cut-Off Marks To Fill Vacant Quota Seats

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

Mumbai: In the history of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), never has there been a second round of admissions. This year, though, all vacant seats at the 13 IIT campuses, as also at IT-BHU and ISM-Dhanbad, will be filled after a second admission list is put out soon.

After a campaign by TOI, officials from the Union HRD ministry met the IIT chiefs in Delhi on Tuesday and asked them to fill up the vacant seats.However, what comes as a shock is that the HRD ministry is not interested in dereserving the vacant seats that were meant for SC, ST and OBC candidates. Instead, the ministry wants the premier engineering schools to dilute merit and further bring down the cut-offs to admit reserved category students. After Tuesday’s meeting, IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad said, “We will be taking additional students.’’ The IIT Joint Admission Board has called for an urgent meeting next week to discuss the modalities of filling up the seats that have gone abegging. Director of IIT-Madras M S Ananth pointed out that it would be criminal to take in students by further lowering the cut-offs (see box). “These students will suffer, and so will their self-confidence,’’ he told TOI.

While the last general category student secured admission scored 180, the last SC/ST candidate got 104.

More students will also be accommodated in the preparatory course, which is like a feeder class that trains SC/ST students for a year to equip them to qualify for the IITs. Students need to take a test at the end of the year-long tutorial. If they qualify, the IIT gates are opened to them. For the preparatory course, each IIT relaxes the lowest SC/ST cut-offs by 55%.

With that figure being 104 for both reserved categories this year, the preparatory course cut-off turned out to be 57 out of a total of 489. This cut-off will dip further if additional students have to be admitted.

Times View
We had argued last week that the 430-odd IIT seats that were going vacant because the reserved quotas (OBC/SC/ST) couldn’t be filled should be thrown open to general category candidates in a second round of admissions. Unfortunately, the government seems to have accepted part of our argument—that letting so many seats go unfilled is a waste of resource—and has twisted it into something that threatens to dilute academic standards. Remember that the cut-off for SC/ST students was a much lower 104 marks (out of 489 marks) compared to 180 for general category students. Even then, there weren’t enough students from the OBC/SC/ST categories to fill the entire reserved quota of 2,380 seats (out of a total of 6,992). Allowing general category students to fill up the unutilised quota would’ve resulted in bringing down their cut-off from 180 to say 170, which would still have been way above the 104 cut-off for SC/ST. Instead, the cut-offs for the reserved categories are now likely to be lowered still further. Apart from the impact it could have on IIT standards, past experience shows that a lot of academically weaker students find it difficult to keep up with the rest, and are later forced to drop out. That does not serve the purpose of helping disadvantaged sections of society.


New IITs to also start preparatory courses
Mumbai: With IITs forced to go in for a second round of admissions to fill their seats, IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad said preparatory courses would begin at the six new IITs too from this year. While this will put an additional burden on the institutes born overnight, it will prevent a repeat of the ‘vacant seat’ scenario next year as those candidates will be eligible for admission then.

The older IITs managed to fill some SC/ST seats with students who were admitted to the preparatory course in 2007, but there were no such admissions at the new IITs.

This year’s sorry situation is the result of the government commissioning six new IITs—in the process increasing the pool of seats by 720—which led to the increase in quota seats (for which there were simply not enough eligible applicants). Despite the cut-off percentage being lowered in the name of affirmative action, enough reserved category students did not made the grade.

This year, 3.11 lakh students took the Joint Entrance Exam for the 6,992 seats in 13 IITs, the Benaras Hindu University (Information Technology school) and the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. Of these, 414 seats had been reserved for ST candidates, but only 159 students were shortlisted. Similarly, only 690 were shortlisted for the 832 SC seats. The OBC figures were 1,099 out of 1,134.