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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Will JEE fill up more seats this year

Last month, I had written about a judgement of Andhra Pradesh High Court which directed JEE to do something to fill up more seats this year. The blog article is here. Last year, 443 seats remained vacant because there were not sufficient number of qualified candidates available to fill them up (1 OBC, 7 SC, 232 ST, and 203 PD - Physically challenged). There were an additional 781 seats that went vacant because selected students did not join (501 General, 109 OBC, 100 SC, 44 ST, and 27 PD). So the total number of vacant seats were 1224. The court was not perturbed by 443 seats. It did not want IITs to lower their standard (and in any case, most of these would result in the corresponding seat in the preparatory course). But the court was seriously perturbed by the 781 seats which went vacant due to students not joining after paying the initial fee.

In the beginning of June 2011, there was a meeting of Directors of all IITs to discuss the court order. They decided to have a 3rd round of seat allocation. Last year, there were only two rounds of seat allocation.

I have a problem with this. If you read the court order, it mildly suggests that perhaps another round of seat allocation will help. In that sense, the Directors have followed the court order and the matter is over. But the court order says much more than obliquely suggesting the third round. Read this:


"It baffles me to note that academicians and administrators of the premier institutions like IITs cannot find a much better process of admission than stopping with the second round of counseling, come what may be the vacancy position in the institutions. It is time that the scholarly inputs are borrowed and implemented at the earliest so that a national waste will not get repeated. I hope and trust that the remedial measures are put in place before the next academic year’s counseling is undertaken."


It is clear that the court is concerned about the vacant seats and wants JEE to do whatever is feasible to reduce the number of vacancies, and some oblique references to 3rd round were just a suggestion, and not the order of the court.

It is clear to me and must have been clear to Directors (and Chairpersons of JEE at different IITs) that a third round of seat allocation will not result in any significant drop in the number of vacant seats. (If you read my previous article on this, I had said even before the meeting of the Directors that the third round will not be effective unless it is conducted after the beginning of the semester. So it is not something that I am saying now with better information on this year's process.)

My contention is that by doing the 3rd round of seat allocation, and taking no other step for reducing the vacancies, JEE is not following the spirit of the court order, as the 3rd round could not possibly solve the problem which the court has ordered it to solve. If there was too little time to come up with the solution for this year, JEE should have gone back to the court and requested for time till next year. Or it should have challenged the court decision. By doing neither, it has accepted the court decision, but still not implemented it in spirit.

5 comments:

Anubhav said...

i don't think this is going to solve the problem, maybe they should go for spot admission like aieee,dce etc.
btw my iit rank is 9550(total seats 9618) and i am still not getting any seat in any course(filled all less hot courses) after 2 rounds!!!!!!
can you clarify sir?

Shishir said...

Reading your blog and seeing the mad rush of students (and parents too!) for anything related to IIT (including coaching!) I have some thoughts about IIT education system .
I believe (and I experienced in late seventies to mid eighties)IIT system (at least IITK) was essentially to inculcate thinking process to solve problems. The subject knowledge was incidental.
This, coupled with the fact that the best reached there,made IIT students suitable for research, higher studies or organisations which put premium on quantified problem solving.This made IITians' reputations in US academic circles and thus back in India.
Indian organizations always relied on 'command and obey' structure and had not much use of IITians' real ability. IITians were recruited just for the prestige factor. In Indian context ,thus, will it be fair to say IITs are the best bet for Indian students who wish to stay back? Will IIT be too good for them? Is mad rush justified? I wonder !

gautam barua said...

It is all very well to say that the JEE should have followed the Court's orders. But what should they have done? Creating more seats results in even more vacancies in ST and PD seats as all extra seats have to be in proportion to the "quotas". There was mention of what Delhi Univ is doing in a earlier post, but notice how they have been "caught" this time re: OBC cut-offs vs eligibility! It has also been pointed out earlier that the bulk of the vacancies are at ISM Dhanbad and in a few courses in some of the IITs. So for the IITs, it is not a major issue.
How one views the problem is also relevant. If programme X has Y seats, and only Y-Z have been filled, then clearly Z seats are vacant. But another way of looking at the issue is that Z extra seats were allotted to ensure Y-Z were filled and this has happened! Half full vs half empty! What needs to be looked at the total number of students entering an IIT. And here all IITs have done very well in increasing their actual intakes in the last few years.

Nikhil said...

I think the issue of vacant seats in IIT can be solved in two ways:
1.Increasing no. of seats in professional engineering programs and decreasing programmes with few or no demand.
2.Offering vacant seats of reserved catagery to general catagery candidates.(Of course this will not violet rules as reserved catagery candidates refused to take it)

devang said...

at 9160 rank,i dnt think i'd get anythng worthwhile and even if the councelling procedure allowed it,i wouldnt bother so the difficulty in filling seats is not that big a problm,although i would prefer if some of my frnds with similar ranks wud get admission(through a spot round like procedure)
coz they really want it!!