Students approach courts over JEE ranking formula

Students who were affected by the newly introduced normalisation formula for JEE Mains' ranking, by Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) and Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), approached the higher courts of Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana, seeking justice and rectification of their ranking. Many students who secured a good score in the JEE Mains, couldn't get within 10,000 ranks, due to the new system being implemented. Addressing the media at Press Club, Basheerbagh on Sunday, the affected students and their parents delivered their grievances of how the new ranking system had rendered them either ineligible or incapable of choosing their choice of National Institutes of Technology (NIT) or branch, for which they had spent years preparing for. There are about 30 NITs all over India, for which the qualifying exam was AIEEE last year, which has been changed to JEE Mains, for which the maximum marks are 360. Until 2012, the score achieved in the JEE Mains exam used to determine the rank. However, from this year, Government of India has introduced a new way of ranking, which has been formulated by CBSE, where 60 percent of marks were to be taken from JEE Mains and 40 percent were to be taken from the Board exams, with a view to encourage better performers in the Board exams in securing NIT engineering admissions. The students' argument was that CBSE hasn't considered the difference in various Board examinations' preparation, conduction, number of students appearing, number of papers, evaluation criteria and most importantly the competition levels of students of different state boards, which resulted in huge disparities in the final ranking. The Government used the on one-size-fits-all solution to compare all the state boards. According to the new formula, a mere difference of 10 or 20 marks caused as a result of missing in just 1 or 2 percentage (for example- as a result of losing marks in second language and English) in Board exams, made huge difference in the final ranking, eliminating several students even though they secured a good JEE score. Another problem with the normalisation according to the students that their 40 percent of Board percentile was supposed to be mapped to 60 percent of JEE mains score to get a total, but instead, it was being mapped to the JEE score of a student with similar Board percentile as theirs, which basically implies that no matter how good a student's JEE mains score may be, the only considering factor will be his/her Board exam percentile. Apart from these, there were several examples and data shown by the students and parents, which proved a discrepancy in rank allotment done. As a result of the new normalisation procedure which was imposed on the students without much deliberation or advance notification. The students pleaded for removing the Board marks component from the present year, or implement 60-40 percent from their own results from JEE mains and Board exams, instead of this comparison of percentile with others. A student who got 95 percent in Board, and 255 marks in JEE mains, yet couldn't secure a good final rank, questioned Kapil Sibal, the Minister for Human Resource Development. "Kapil Sibal, is 95 percent not good enough?" the students queried the Union Minister.