IITs now plan a preparatory course for students with low scores

This year, the Indian Institute of Technology will allow students with lesser marks to secure admission into the institution. An Economic Times report suggested that the institute, this year, will be admitting students with scores as low as 31 out of 504, or 6.1%, to fill vacant seats. However, in 2014 the minimum percentage was 8.8%.

Higher negative marking and subjective components in the JEE (Advanced) 2015 question paper made it tricky for the students to score higher marks. Therefore, the limit of taking admission into IITs has been lowered down to 24.5% from 35% for the general category; while for the reserved categories, the cut-off has come down to 12.25%.

Even after reducing the minimum percentage limit, IITs will not fill all seats in these categories. For the candidates with even lesser scores, a separate third category has been created and candidates with as low as 6.1% would be sent for a special preparatory course.

The preparatory course would be a year-long program with special training in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. The number of candidates for this program would be no more than 10 in maximum institutes while in a few institutes, the count might go up to 20.

A Times of India report suggested that after the first round of seats allocations to the students, a sum of 591 seats remained vacant. Among the vacant seats, most of them are reserved for the candidates in ST (scheduled tribes) and PwD (people with disabilities) categories.

An IIT director said final position on seat vacancies will be known after the third round, but indicated that "IITs have to follow constitutional reservation. Seats cannot be kept vacant due to the sheer demand for admissions in our institutes," he said, but "what government can instead do is improve secondary education. Also the tutoring system for preparatory courses needs to evolve in IITs to ensure they are fit for our B Tech programs."
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