Govt wants lower qualifying marks for girls in IIT

Girls preparing for the joint entrance examination to be held in June for admissions to under-graduate programmes of the Indian Institutes of Technology may get some relaxation in qualifying marks. if the suggestion is accepted by the Joint Admission Board. “We have suggested the IIT’s joint admission board to consider giving girl candidates some relaxation in qualifying marks during admission. But, the decision has to be taken by the board on this issue,” a HRD Ministry official said. The suggestion has been given to the board, which will conduct JEE-Advance for admissions to IITs in June this year, keeping in view that very less number of girls make it to the IITs compared to boys, he added. A total of 4.68 lakh candidates appeared in the last JEE. Of these, 13,602 candidates cleared the entrance examination. The number of successful girls in the test stood at just 1,491 girls, nearly 11 per cent of total number of successful candidates. The girls have already been exempted from paying fees for appearing in JEE-Advance in an effort to encourage their participation in the IITs, the Ministry official said. The JEE, to be conducted in two parts—JEE Main and JEE Advance for mainly admissions to the Centrally-funded technical institutes including IITs and National Institutes of Technology—is scheduled to be held on April 7 and June 2 this year. For those seeking to appear online in paper I of the JEE-Main, the test will be conducted on April 8 and April 25. The JEE-Main will be conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) for admissions to the technical institutes other than IITs. Only top 20 percentile holders in their respective class XII board examinations will be eligible for taking JEE Advance.  The joint admission board of IITs will screen about 1.50 lakh students for the test on the basis of their performance in the JEE Main. Students belonging to scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes will be screened for the JEE-Advance on the basis of quota applicable to them. Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, will also give admissions to students on the basis of their performance in JEE-Advance. Many deemed-to-be universities and the governments of Gujarat, Haryana and Uttarakhand have agreed to use the test scores for admissions to their engineering colleges functioning in their respective jurisdictions from this year. DECCAN HERALD