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Monday, May 13, 2013

JEE 2013: Normalizing Board Marks

Last year, MHRD had decided that normalized board marks (12th class) shall be taken into account for admissions to engineering programs in CFTIs (Centrally Funded Technical Institutes) except IITs. The marks in AIEEE (now, JEE Main) and the normalized board marks shall be added in the 60:40 ratio to come up with the final ranking.

Of course, I continue to believe that considering 12th class marks in ranking is not a good idea for reasons we had explained in the last year's debates, but something had to be done for 2013. The main issue was how do we normalize marks across diverse boards. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer.

Again, if we go back to last year's debates, there were essentially two sides - one side suggesting that all boards are equal. That in any large board, the distribution of native intelligence had to be similar, and hence X percentile of one board had to be of similar intelligence as X percentile of another board. The opponents, on the other hand, suggested that board exams did not test intelligence but academic preparation, and hence whether the native intelligence is equally distributed or not is an irrelevant point. Also, there are several types of intelligence, and we don't need to ensure intelligence of all sorts for engineering admissions. Engineering admissions on the basis of demonstrated performance is a fairer mechanism rather than some unverifiable claims of someone having raw intelligence.

The opposite side, therefore, suggested that there has to be some mechanism of comparing boards. A student with same percentile in a "better" board has to be given higher marks out of 40 than another student with same percentile in a worse board. And this side had suggested that we find a way to compare the boards and come up with a method where appropriate adjustment can be made to someone's percentile performance based on whether the board was better or worse.

In the last 8-9 months, there have been numerous committees, numerous experts from not just within India, but outside India as well, who have looked at this problem, and there have been several reports, minutes of the meetings, comments, and so on.

Out of all the suggestions for comparing the boards, the one which has caught fancy of many experts is where students of all the boards are tested in one common exam (called an auxiliary exam or an anchor exam), and how students of a board perform in that common exam will be taken as a measure of performance of that board per se. And one notices that we do have one common exam across all the boards to whom these students belong, and that exam is JEE (Main). So we could look at the performance of students of different boards in JEE Main and based on their relative performance, we could adjust or normalize their board marks. If from a particular board, most students perform very well, then the same percentile score of that board should correspond to higher normalized score.

There are some issues though. This method of having a common auxiliary exam is a good method to normalize performances if some conditions hold. These conditions include: students appearing in JEE Main from a particular board constitute a representative sample of that board, and students of a particular board do not enjoy any particular advantage or disadvantage over students of another board, in respect of the JEE Main examination.

It has been argued that the stronger boards indeed have an advantage over weaker boards in respect to their performance in JEE Main. This advantage comes from a greater degree of alignment of the syllabus of 12th class with the syllabus of JEE Main. Second, the stronger boards happen to be those who offer education in Hindi and English, and since JEE Main was in three languages - English, Hindi, and Gujarati this year, this would have given some advantage to the students of stronger boards.

It has also been argued that the students from a board giving JEE Main do not constitute (based on 2012 AIEEE data) a representative sample. In fact, we see that even a 50 percentile student of a strong board feels confident of giving JEE Main while even a 80 percentile student of a weak board does not give JEE Main.

Another argument has been that the auxiliary exam should have a similar mix of subjects as those exams which we are trying to compare, which means that at least a language paper should be there too in the auxiliary exam.

However, I consider them as weak arguments. If there is greater alignment of syllabus in case of stronger boards, it is not because other boards are teaching different topics, but it is because other boards are teaching less. Exams like JEE have been around for 50 years. Why haven't those boards aligned their syllabi to such exams in 50 years. It is primarily because they can't. They are the weaker boards.

The language could be of some help, no doubt, but a large number of weak boards have a large fraction of their students learning in Hindi. Second, this option of regional language paper was given to all states, if they agree to use JEE Main for engineering admission. Third, the impact of language is reduced in an objective type test. It would be much higher in long answer type exam. But let us agree that there could be some impact of this.

The students not forming a representative sample is true but its impact on the final normalized marks is not likely to be significant. For example, if there is a weaker board where only top few are giving the exam (this is what the data from 2012 shows), then the performance of that board will "artificially" improve. So this is actually helping weaker boards.

As far as JEE Main not being a good enough common test, even if we agree for the sake of argument, then which is a better test. Unfortunately, there is no other common test. Can we argue that the JEE Main is such a bad common test that it is throwing up all random results and therefore just considering all boards as equal is a better assumption. If this is the case, then perhaps we need to junk JEE Main itself.

So the debate on normalization has been intense. All boards being equal versus JEE Mains being a good enough auxiliary exam to compare boards. Notice that for 2014 onwards, if the government persists with this idea of using the board marks, perhaps someone can design a better auxiliary exam as well (what will then happen to One Nation, One Test). But we need to do something for 2013.

This has been debated in so many committees that any resolution is impossible. The data of 2012 cannot conclusively tell us whether the advantage that a student from a good board enjoys is exclusively because s/he is a better student. I think that those who argue for all boards being equal have no data at all, and hence they arguing that the data on the other side is imperfect and therefore their side wins is quite funny. But then one does realize the limitation of considering JEE Main as the auxiliary exam to compare all boards.

And that is how a compromise has been evolved for 2013. The compromise essentially accepts that students from stronger boards will show a strong performance in JEE Main compared to other boards. But it argues that it is not clear how much of that "stronger" performance is due to their being better academically prepared versus other factors mentioned above. And hence we don't give them the full benefit of stronger performance.

In other words, we consider what would be normalized marks if we were to treat all boards being equal. And also, what would be normalized marks if we were to consider JEE Mains as an ideal auxiliary exam and treat performance of students of different boards in JEE Mains as reflecting on the quality of academic preparation of all students of those boards. And then take the average of the two normalized scores.

I am sure this will annoy everyone. Those who strongly believe in equality of boards will see this as an attempt to favor certain boards. And those who equally strongly believe that some boards have a much greater fraction of academically better prepared students will see this as a political compromise under pressure from weaker boards. But I see this as just a way to ensure that we can do admissions in 2013 without much litigation, and a way to make some headway in a bad situation that we have all been forced into. I also think that we have been able to establish the principle that there are stronger and weaker boards, which was extremely important to me. In absence of relevant data, we may or may not have been fair to stronger boards, but I do hope that someone will start thinking of 2014 right away, and come up with a better process to compare boards (or as one lives on hope, we will stop comparing board marks for admission purposes).


Of course, if you read the exact method on JEE Main website, it won't read like what I have written above. The reason is as follows.

When you are adding two quantities, they must have same units. For example, if I say that I walked for 100 meters and then I walked another 50 meters, how much did I walk, one can add the two quantities and say that I walked 150 meters. But if I say that I walked 100 meters and then I walked for another 30 seconds, now it is incorrect to add the two quantities and give a total distance.

Similarly, it would be improper to add JEE Main marks with either percentile or board marks, etc. All the committees before us had therefore suggested that board performance has to be converted into an "equivalent" JEE Main performance. So both JEE marks and normalized board marks have to be from the same total and should have similar distribution. So if you consider board performance, one looks at it in percentile terms, and then see what would that percentile in JEE Main be and give that many marks to the student. Notice this would be the case when we consider all boards to be equal, and whether a student has received X percentile in board 'A' or board 'B', s/he will be mapped to the same marks which correspond to X percentile in JEE Main result.

On the other hand, when we consider relative performances of the board, then X percentile in board 'A' would map to X percentile in JEE Main amongst those students who gave 12th class exam from that same board. These marks would be higher for a board whose relative performance in JEE Main is better.

And yes, I was a member of the JEE Interface Group whose task it was to look at everything that various committees had done in the last 8 months, and recommend a "final" solution for 2013.

205 comments:

1 – 200 of 205   Newer›   Newest»
Shishir said...

The procedure actually omits the fact that for a similar difference in percentile scores the difference in marks is almost 3 times in JEEmains than in Board eg diff in marks in CBSE Board between 87%(about90%ile)and 92%(about 97%ile)wud be only 25 (for total marks 500)BUT the same marks forsame percentiles in JEEmains wud be about 105 and 165 i.e. a diff of 60 marks.Thus Difference has been amplified before application of 0.4 factor.

Unknown said...

Given the set of conditions, one agrees with most of what is being said here.

However, one must take into account that in each board there will be a distribution of people. So someone in a board which has better average performers, tends to gain even though s/he is not so good. And good people in "weaker" boards lose. A hierarchy is created, which gradually alienates people from the "weaker" boards. Such hierarchy can not self-sustain and requires external means. This is the philosophy of excluding people, rather than being more inclusive.

However, this does not address the main issue. Is JEE necessary because of diverse boards? If all over India, there was only one board, could we dispense with JEE? This may sound like mixing different issues, but is deeply connected. Can JEE devise methods to make a selection on the basis of school education, and not on what one learns in coaching institutes?

The roots need to be fixed, not the fruits. And that is much more difficult.

Unknown said...

Sir,

Thanks for providing more insights in to the normalization procedure.

I have some queries regarding this.

1. JEE Main mark distribution seems to be very sparse on the top (there are relatively very few students who got above 250 or 300 out of 360). Now the board percentile is used to look up the JEE Main marks(percentile vs marks table?)and decide the normalized score corresponding to the board mark. I think, even a very small change in board percentile (at the top) might result in big difference in JEE Mains marks taken for normalization purpose.

It would be good if CBSE can publish the percentile corresponding to each and every mark below 360.

2. Since individual board population is small compared to JEE Main population, I would like to know what kind of approximations will be used while anchoring the board percentile with JEE Main percentile.

Looking forward to your views,

Best regards,
Nandakumar

Unknown said...

Wow! It would be a great day when lawmakers provided this kind of analysis and philosophical motivations whenever they introduce a new bill in the parliament.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

@Shishir and @ Nandakumar, there are two aspects of the process. One is all boards being equal versus all boards not being equal. The other is how do we map the board performance to a number which can be combined with JEE Main score. Both of you have a question about the second aspect.

Now, this aspect was not discussed much, since what we had was comments from several statistics experts, and all of them agreeing to the model that has been used. Irrespective of whether they favored "all boards are equal" or "all boards are not equal" philosophy. These included people who had favored this thing about common exam, and those who had strongly opposed it last year. (I must place on record my appreciation for CBSE and JEE Apex Group to reach out to several people who had opposed this common exam tooth and nail last year and ask them to help improve the situation to the extent possible.)

Considering that there was no divergent opinion amongst statistics experts on this, we just agreed to this.

But if you think about it, if the distribution of marks is different in two exams, any mapping from one to the other will throw up examples of the kind you are giving. For example, we could have converted JEE Main score also to percentile and then combined the two percentiles, but that would have just meant that two students who are in the long tail (top few) part of the JEE Main would lose that difference. The difference of 20 marks may show up as a difference of 0.1 percentile. Will that be fair.

I think all this discussion is only pointing to one thing. That we need to spend a lot more time on finding a better way to admit students to higher education.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

@Sudhir, Actually my gut feeling (with some very limited data) is that a person shifting from a strong board to a weaker board is actually being helped by this method. I had written a blog about this a couple of months ago as to why people should shift from stronger boards to weaker board. I wish I had data to back me up more strongly.

"All boards are equal" has this romantic ring around it. So I am not surprised that a lot of people with absolutely no data support this and call the other side elitist, or supporting the philosophy of exclusion. Any time one talks about merit or academic preparation (and note that I am not even using the words like excellence), they are dubbed as exclusionary. I am used to it after the massive debates last year on this. But I was hoping that at least you would do that only after giving some data.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

Thanks, Saurabh.

Siddharth Jain said...

Sir, What I infer from the method is that a percentile based on JEE MAIN score of all students at ALL India basis and one based on board marks percentile of his own board will be given equal weightage. That I feel is simply 80% JEE Score + 20% Board component. Is it? or i am reading it wrong. Please Help

Vinod Kumar Sharma said...

Sir, can you justify this: Student A of CBSE has secured 100 marks in JEE (Main) but has got 99.9 percentile in board. His final likely score will be 0.6*100+0.4*.5(345+345)=60 +138 = 198. Another student B of CBSE has has got 250 marks in JEE(Main) and 97 percentile in CBSE.His final likely score will be 0.6*250+0.4*.5(145+155)=100 +60 = 160.

santanudey said...

My son got 232 marks in JEE Mains but secured only 90 % in the AP Board exam which is just around 80 percentile.In the same Board many student secured 97-98 % in the board but scored only 35-40 in JEE Mains.My son JEE rank with out Board marks will be around 5000-10000 out of 12 lacs but ironically he does not figure in the top 1.2 lacs students out of 5 lacs odd in AP Board.This clearly shows the deficiency of the new system.The future of NITs are bleaker than IITs.Kindly do the needful to stop this gross injustice.Particularly in states like Andhra Pradesh where you can buy marks non corporate rural students will suffer a lot.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

@Siddharth, actually no. Look at the examples of the next comment.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

@Vinod, It is not a question of whether one is fair or not. I have made it amply clear over the last one year that I am not in favor of considering board marks for ranking in admissions. But the government wants that the school board topper be able to get admission in any NIT.

aaa said...

Dear Sir,

one more thing.. as u have brought out that u were a member of the group, did any one evaluate this nice formulae for normalisation of marks across various boards by taking examples of real marks? If yes, could I request u to share the same please..

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

@aaa, I have not approved your earlier comment, since that is not adding value to the discussion. It is just complaining about the situation, which frankly is irrelevant for this post.

Regarding this comment, yes, we were shown several tables, graphs, etc., with both the schemes. But seeing lots of tables and graphs can only give you a sense of what is happening, and one cannot pickup individual anomalies that may happen. And frankly, as I have said in the blog, any normalization will have anomalies.

So what I have been advocating is that board marks not be used for ranking. However, because something was announced last year, which in an abstract level has stood the test of legal challenges, and something has to be done to implement that in a very short period, therefore, this is the best option that we could think of.

I don't claim to be an expert in this area, and hence it is quite possible that there are better schemes out there. I haven't seen any one yet, after reading all the material collected over the last 8 months diligently. I haven't seen any suggestion either on this blog or anywhere else, just examples of where this system is not fair.

Given that I haven't seen any better scheme which is within the constraints of the system of admission for 2013, I am convinced that the committee did not leave out any obvious and better solution.

Yes, this is not perfect, not even close to it, and I have repeatedly admitted that taking board marks into ranking will always be a problematic thing, and hence that itself should be relooked into by the government.

Vinod Kumar Sharma said...

There was slight error in calculation in second example in my above post. It should read 0.6*250+0.4*.5(145+155)=150 +60 = 210.

Vinod Kumar Sharma said...

Sir, one improvement over the method can be that we can discard scores of top 0.25% candidates (about 3000 in number) from the process of normalization. That is to say a person with 100 percentile gets JEE score against 99.75 percentile in JEE. This way stray scores above 275 can be eliminated from the process of normalization. Neglecting stray values is normal in statistical methods.

Unknown said...

May be 40% seats can be filled based only on normalized board mark and remaining 60% seats based on JEE Main marks? This way we can avoid any glitches due to merging two different streams.

Unknown said...

This is to add further to my earlier suggestion to reserve NIT seats in 40:60 ratio for giving admission through normalized board percentile and/or JEE Main score.

To leverage the advantages of both board and JEE Main performance, we can impose the following constraint.

Person seeking admission using normalized board percentile should have at least 70/80 percentile point in JEE Main exam. And, for JEE Main score based admission person should have secured at least 70/80 percentile point in board percentile (normalized across boards).

Unknown said...

sir, could u please tell whether list of jee main percentile of aggregate marks scored in jee main of all boards will be made or just percentile of a student calculated among students of diff board and respective board will be computed to percentile of corresponding jee main aggregate marks at all india level

Shishir said...

As I commented earlier what is happening in the present scheme is that a difference of 25 marks in board exam is amplified to about 75 marks in jmains terms thus diff in Board marks are being actually given weightage of 300*0.4=120%

SP said...

Dear Professor

What about changing the JEE/Board ratio from 60/40 to 80/20. After this years admissions, it is possible to check what should be the percentage ratio of board marks to select the most suitable candidates.

Prerna Goswami said...

Dear sir,
There is an announcement about normalization of board percentile for JEE main final scoring, Which says Final JEE main sore=0.6 A0+ 0.4 Bfinal where
Bfinal=0.5(B1+B2)
It is however not clear that while calculating B1 and B2 the percentile considered will be out of all the students appeared (ie approx 14 lakhs) or there will be some specified cut off score as was in case of AIEEE 2012 where cut off for candidates eligible for counseling was around 48 for general category. In this case no of candidates considered for calculating percentile will be around 3 lakh 50 thousand.
For example if a candidate has percentile score 98 in his/her particular board for calculating his aggregate score marks corresponding to 28000 rank (98 percentile of 14 lakh) will be considered or 7000 rank (98 percentile considering a certain cutoff say 50 marks or so). This will make a huge difference in the score calculated in the above two cases.
For example a student scores 230 marks in JEE main, according to 98 percentile his
In case 1 B1 will be equated to a candidate having 28000 rank (98 percentile of 14 lakh out of which may are non serious) in JEE main aggregate score say between 150 to 160
or In case 2 B1 may be score of 7000 rank (98percentile of say 3.5 lakh serious aspirants considering a cut off score say 50) say around 180 to 190.
Let the person belong to a week board (although being good but concentrating more on entrance exams) his aggregate JEE main score will be even less (not his score but score of some one else way below him say having
a state rank around 6000 (considering all students appeared, out of which many are non serious if the board size is approx 3 lakhs), say this is 100. So his B2 score will be 100.
If candidates above a specific cut off are considered say they are only 50000 then his score B2 will be equal to a state rank 1000 say around 190 ( 98 percentile of 50000 serious candidates)
so the final score of the same candidate in case 1(considering all non serious andidates)=
0.6*230+0.2*150+0.2*100=188
In case 2 (cosidering candidates above a particular cut off say 50 marks in JEE main)
0.6*230+.2*180+.2*190=212
Although in both cases it is less than his actual score 230 but in second case it is nearer to his actual score. In first case if all non serious students are considered for percentile score than the deserving person as per his JEE main score will be denied admission to many NITs for which he is otherwise suitable.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

@Prerna, the normalization formula makes it very clear that for computation of Board percentile, all students of the board who gave exams in the specified 5 subjects, will be considered for computation of percentile. That is, including those students who may have failed the board exam. I would assume that if the percentile for board exam is being computed from all students, including those who fail, the percentile for the JEE Main would also be computed with the same principle.

Unknown said...

Dheeraj: What I understood from your blog was that you advocated for greater weight to students of "better" boards. If this is what you mean then my take on this is: out of all the candidates that write the exam., making classes of candidates on the basis of boards is creating a structure. IFF this structure helps anyone, no matter students of which board, then I feel uncomfortable. It is not a level playing field. Let the merit be decided by ONE exam, and then there is nothing exclusionary.

The (proposed/speculated) structure based on boards is a little like caste system in our society. Preferring students of a certain board works like a reservation., albeit not explicit.

K V Narayana Murty said...

Sir,
In the JEE examinations, for a question there are 4 possible options for the correct answer. In the examinations of national and international level like CAT, GRE, GMAT etc. there are 5 possible answers. Making 5 options in JEE could possibly reduce the chance of students getting correct by means other than knowing the right answer. Is there a reason for not choosing 5 options and taking only 4 options.
KV Narayana murty

Unknown said...

make it simple....may i know who is finally goin to benefit from this system...the board toppers or the jee main toppers.......?please keep it simple and clear.....thanks

aaa said...

Dear Sir,

Could u tell if the issue as to 'why the normalisation procedure is being finalised so late that is after board exams as well as JEE Exams' was also discussed during the meeting?

Given the untested formulae as it sounds today, would it have not been better to at least announce it before the board exams?

At any stage of discussion for finalisation of normalisation procedure, was there a feeling that what is being done for 2013 is to just go through this one year with some untested formuale or was there also a feeling that why not do away with weightage to board due to complexities involved even if it shows backing down from a stated position?

thanx

Unknown said...

Dheeraj Sir,
It will be highly appreaciated if you could elaborate the normalization of score by giving an illustrative example so as to enable a layman to understand it clearly

aaa said...

dear sir,

would u clarify one more issue? the board percentile will be calculated for all students of that board irrespective of the stream,i.e. science, commerce etc or amongst students of a particular stream? Comparing different streams with students having different subjects may not be correct????

Arvinder Chadha said...

Dear Dheeraji

I personally feel that this normalisation has tried to address the issue to a great extent and as far as I understand a person who is scoring 250 and above in JEE should score more than 90% in boards. If they dont score more in boards then lets check the reason why is he not able to score high in boards and getting more in JEE mains. A good person should be good everywhere and not only in JEE or not only in boards. Actually Ministry has tried to address issue of coaching to an extent but again this will create more pressure on students as now they need to perform well everywhere and which is correct also.

aaa said...

@arvind chadha sir,

If forcing students to do well in a board is the grand desire, then why not do away with JEE Main altogether and select students after normalisation of board marks? On the other hand, if a student doing well in JEE Main is also supposed to do well in Boards, then why not do away with Boards weightage? Well, it is a catch 22 situation in which students have been put into without realising its damaging potential besides the fact it does not address any of the shown concerns of the HRD for bringing in the changes in a hurried and opaque manner. It would be worth taking a chance to examine as to how many number of coaching institutes have come up additionally after the announcement of this system, how many more students have joined coaching, how many integrated schools (to teach for boards and entrance exams) have opened, how much increase in coaching fees, and how much tension enhancement it has given to students, parents and well wishers. And sone pe suhaga is the normalisation process which has left everyone gasping for breath as its impact is going to be clear only when the All India Ranks are declared in July 2013. Hopefully CBSE will disclose JEE Main marks for corresponding board percentiles or may be it will charge Rs 500/- fees for the same as well. To which decimal point percentiles will be calculated is also not clear. Last year, there was some talk of calculating it to nine decimal points to break the logjam. well, it seems even .1 mark in 12th Boards is going to be make a difference. So let us wait for the end game to begin.

Well, the process was designed to reduce the tension and uncertainties but it has done just the opposite.

Arvinder Chadha said...

@aaa

But why cant a person doing well in jee main not perform well in his board exams also? Are board exams so tough? and similar thought can be put to why a person doing well in board exams cannot do well in jee mains.. Is jee main tough for him? The catch here is that most of person who will be getting 260 and above will be doing well in boards as well. Now we need to analyse the fact that why a person cannot do well in both exams ? We should not do away with JEE main as you cannot decide fate of a student on basis of one exam rather this system is good where it gives chance to a candidate where an overall performance can be judged. When you try to develop a new system always their are positives and negatives to it and always their is a resistance to change. I have even heard that IIMs are now looking to your entire career marks including X and XII before they call you for interview and GD irrespective of your score in CAT. They are also trying to figure out and address certain issues in their system. and yes time will definitely tell whats the failure or best part of the new system

Arvinder Chadha said...

@aaa

But why cant a person doing well in jee main not perform well in his board exams also? Are board exams so tough? and similar thought can be put to why a person doing well in board exams cannot do well in jee mains.. Is jee main tough for him? The catch here is that most of person who will be getting 260 and above will be doing well in boards as well. Now we need to analyse the fact that why a person cannot do well in both exams ? We should not do away with JEE main as you cannot decide fate of a student on basis of one exam rather this system is good where it gives chance to a candidate where an overall performance can be judged. When you try to develop a new system always their are positives and negatives to it and always their is a resistance to change. I have even heard that IIMs are now looking to your entire career marks including X and XII before they call you for interview and GD irrespective of your score in CAT. They are also trying to figure out and address certain issues in their system. and yes time will definitely tell whats the failure or best part of the new system till then we can only keep fingers crossed and hope for the best and then further improvements in the system can be addressed

Prashant said...

So much for the theory of top-20 percentile cut-offs not varying year to year. The top 20 percentile for ISC stands at approximately 88%.

Kots said...

I know of a case where a student scored more than 250 in JEE mains and got 83% in the AP state board exams. What a pity the student can't get admission to IITs even if the student gets All India first because the student is not n top 20 Percentile of AP Board. It is even pity that students scoring more than 97% were not even selected for JEE Advance or got only 120 marks in JEE Mains. AP board sees only hand writing, repeat-ability of students and not analyzing skills. I am not sure how long these Parrots go when they join IITS. Why have a 20 percentile cut off when it throws up such anomalies. Are the IITs not confident of their own JEE advance test that they should ask for top 20 percentile of the boards? Can anyone help such students who did well in JEE but could not come up to top 20 percentile in their boards.

Shishir said...

@Dheeraj,
when the original theme was to take 0.6 of Apples and 0.4 of Oranges why on earth JIG tried to covert oranges to Apples?
The only normalisation which needed to be fixed was amongst Oranges of Sikkim, Maharashtra et al.

santanudey said...

@ Kots
My son scored 232 in JEE Mains but got only 89.3% in AP board.He is out of JEE(ad) by 3 marks,the cut off being 89.8%.I am afraid that the new normalisation formula will keep him out of NITs as well.I personally know many students from AP who got 97% in Board but only 35 in JEE Mains.The total system is unfair.

Kots said...

@Santanudey
you got good news today. mostly the threshold lowered to 85% as they are considering all branches for top 20 percentile. All the best for your son.

aaa said...

@Shishir and Shantanudey,

well one can see the problems the 'well thought out formulae' by MHRD with the support of JIG, seem to be creating. the fact of the matter is there is no data to support their formuala of normalisation of marks across various boards otherwise it would have been out in public domain. What the present system does is that it puts tremendous pressure on students to do well in boards as well as in JEE Mains.

the vagaries of different boards to include available infrastructure in schools, teaching faculty, the syllabus, the marking system (not to mention the necessary evils in some parts of India like cheating, copying etc) make the point of giving weightage to boards very suspect. Someone above has said, taking both i.e. boards and JEE Main gives a student two chances and compensates for one bad day. Better solution would have been to have different cutoff marks in boards for various boards for appearing for IIT Exam and give two chances to appear in AIEEE within a period of one month to all students and take the better score to make the merit. But most of us do not matter in the scheme of things.

Muhammed said...

I have come across something interesting. First let me point out some facts.The kerala state board is one of the most generous boards in our country and around 50 odd students who secured 1200/ 1200 marks(how many CBSE and ISC students has ever done this kind of a thing) in the final exam from this board might have appeared for jee main 2013.
One or two students from kerala has scored above 315 in jee main.Now if one of them ;eg:the one who has scored 336 happens to be from the kerala state board ; things will be really interesting.
Those 50 odd students will get a normalised board marks of 136 in jee without taking into consideration their normalised jee main score.
I mean this may turn out to be an unfair advantage for them over their counterparts from tougher boards like ISC and CBSE with a board marks percentage of 94 which is comparable to 100 percent in kerala state board.
Isn't this absurd.How is CBSE 'NEUTRALISING BOARD ADVANTAGE'?

Muhammed said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Muhammed said...

Then why not reserve one or two seats as in BITS?

sudeshna said...

This is an unnecessarily complex process. Instead of keeping the proces simple and fair, there are progressive attempts to make the system more and more inscrutable. Initially the gullible people were told that the simple percentile in board will be added to marks in JEE, explaining that in this process the impact of Board performance will be minimal. Then people woke up that it is not fair to add apples and oranges, so after the exam, they started talking about converting percentile to marks or marks to percentile. Initially people were informed that such a scheme will help students of the state boards who were at a disadvantage due to syllabus mismatch with JEE and other such things. Then comes this formula which does just the opposite - that is, create disadvantage for state boards students. The process suggested is tom my mind the worst possible. A student is no longer in sole control of her performance - her performance depends on how many toppers of her board take JEE and how they perform. All this in name of fairness.
Can the authors of this system tell us what data they have used to come up with this complex formula?

Unknown said...

The Board marks are going to make large impact on the JEE final Score and ranks after normalization. Even in Andhra Pradesh the Board marks are taken into consideration for the final ranking of EAMCET exam, but the impact is not huge. As commented above the formula should have been declared well in advance. With late declaration, it amounted to giving retrospective effect. I think this is a good ground to challenge the decision before Hon’ble Delhi High Court.

Shishir said...

The detailed example now has been posted on official JEE Mains website and that confirms the worst fears.
A difference of only 25 numbers in Board Marks (out of 500) between two students scoring 96% and 91% would be transplanted as a difference of 263 marks (343-80 for same percentile diff). That is inflating diff by 1000%. Almost all JEE Mains top scorers are likely to be blown away.
Below is the table showing relative steep difference at top percentile (which matters for admission in NITs.)
%ile JMains Board Board
Numbers Numbers Percent
2.31 10 35 7
4.19 18 65 13
5.65 20 105 21
9.84 30 145 29
48.33 35 290 58
50.07 41 300 60
89 43 420 84
89.87 48 425 85
96.81 80 455 91
99.13 218 470 94
99.56 343 480 96

K V Narayana Murty said...

are your musings totally public? these are showing up on a simple search for a topic on JEE on google.

Unknown said...

Sir, my point is that considering board marks is not such a bad idea.
For e.g. it may happen that a bright student have bad day on entrance date (of course it is only one paper of it) then not considering his board performance will ruin his one year (1 paper ruins 1 year). After all he has done hard work on his board exams.
It also restricts business of expensive coaching institutes which
benefits only those who can afford it.
Also overall performance must be observed ( as it is question of one's career ).For e.g. an IIT-JEE topper scores only 70% while a board topper secures only 80 in JEE.
But this mechanism of considering performances is not worthy. Can it happen that 50% admissions are taken on board merit (reserve seats from every board as per its student strenght) and 50% from JEE marks.
Please guide me through it.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

@V Narayana Murty Kolapalli,

Yes, the Musings are public.

rahul said...

It's a pity that a student from a good board with a decent percentage on board exam and a good total on JEE will be rejected while an average student from a weaker board will write the advanced exam. Although it may not greatly affect the student quality at IIT as there are only 7000 seats but NITs are running the risk of getting average students.
I am personally from a weak board and what the professor pointed out is absolutely correct. In my board, there were long questions which require you to write long paragraphs. I wrote JEE in 2006 and have completed my undergraduate studies from one of the IITs. The biggest disadvantage I faced because of my prior educational background was language problem. Although I had little problem comprehending lectures, I, most of the time, was depressed as I felt like standing in the middle of nowhere because of my lack of fluency in English. In the final year, when I wrote reports and papers, I had to revise the same countless times. But does board exam take care of this? No. Secondly, the major problem is the lack of research culture, not the quality of incoming students. I did an internship at TIFR and noticed a heaven and hell difference between the work cultures.Thirdly, the new selection procedure might have worked in 80s, but now with English medium schools opening in almost all towns , very few good students study in state boards. Only time will tell how effective this method is.

Unknown said...

shishir cbse has just provided an example...this 14lakh students hav given jee main..........if a student scores 92% in 12th it means his percentile is likely to be between 97-98....which means 2-3% students are above him....u can simply calculate the 2% of 14lakh that is 28k.....which accordin to previous year statistics must correspond to the mark 170.....agree there wil be huge differnce due to normalisation...this much of a diffenrence between 91% and 94% is not possible....wud like to see ur comments on this prof sanghi and shishir

Shishir said...

@Nisha
See rank #1 i.e.100%ile in last Year AIEEE was 343 marks.
Rank #2800 i.e. approx 99.7%ile was at 270 marks.
This means that at the top there is a difference of 73 marks in JMains for a meagre %ile diff of only 0.3.
For similar %ile diff in Board the diff in marks wud hardly be 5 marks.
So you know how badly student X at 99.7%ile wud be hit because of this unmatched transplantation vis-à-vis student Y at 100%ile in Board.
This huge amplification occurs for top 3%ile which is yhe range that matters for admission in NITs.
For bottom %iles below 95%ile there wud not be any difference but that is not worth discussion. Who gets meaningful branch in good NITs at 70000 rank.

santanudey said...

In AP board the 95 percentile corresponds to around 95% marks .Similarly in CBSE it will be around 90%.Those who gets lesser than this will not make it to the list irrespective of their JEE marks.As for example someone getting as low as 150 with 98 percent board marks(very common in AP)will have a much better rank than someone with 250 JEE score and 91% board marks.Now what will be the options open for these students if they don't crack JEE advanced ?Private colleges like BITS,VIT,SRM etc.In my opinion cut off marks for these colleges is also going to rise dramatically.

santanudey said...

IIIT (Hyderabad) will take admission based on JEE(Mains) score only.I hope other Private colleges who consider JEE(Mains) score like BIT Mesra,DAICT,LNMIIT,Thapar will follow them.

Not yet! said...

The point raised by Shishir is a very important one.

This new solution is simply incorrect, because consider a simple case below:

1. 'A' scores Rank 1 in JEE Main. His/her marks 360/360.

2. A scores 85% in CBSE boards (which is pretty decent I must say).

Lets make a fair assumption that these marks will probably correspond to about 90% percentile in the boards.

Now for the calculation of 40% equivalent from boards: If there are 12 lakh people giving JEE Main, this person will be allotted marks equivalent to 90% of the JEE main, which would be what someone at Rank 60000 would be getting (since at that rank he would be at 90% percentile in the JEE Main).

Now now, can you not spot the error. You cannot take the scores from one exam and equate them to another. This is simply a wrong idea to begin with.

So there's going to be a hell lot of difference if someone gets 80% in CBSE boards and Rank 1 in JEE Main, he might not even figure in top 2 final ranking. This is just stupid.

Unknown said...

Some one may to court of law and stop the admission process of NIT's and IIT's. The described method is unlawfull.. and added another system of reservations...

Shishir said...

@santanudey
IIIT-H admission for Undergraduates is based on Ranks in JMains and not on Jmains numbers. I have individually petitioned them for accepting admissions based on Jmains Marks only citing the preposterous formula.They may take cognizance if other request are also received.
@Rajeev
yes this scheme is fit for legal action as originally impression was that there wud be weightage of 60/40 % to JMains/Board MARKS and not such a stupid transplantation of marks.
@Not Yet
This Year 90%ile in JMains wud correspond to about 140000 rank (10% of 1400000 applicants) and corresponding marks wud be about 80 only.

santanudey said...

From the initial advertisement of IIIT(H) I had a feeling that they were going to consider the JEE(Mains) marks only.But now the website says that they are going to consider JEE(Mains) ranks ,in that case I am wrong.I have already written mails to IIT(H),BIT(Mesra),DAICT etc regarding this faulty normalisation process. But I feel someone of the stature of Prof Dheeraj Sanghi writing to them to consider the case will have more impact and they may even consider the case which will give the unfortunate students some respite.

Not yet! said...

@ Shishir, thanks for pointing out my mistaken calculation. I took it for 95% percentile out of 12 lakh candidates.

Now giving a 90 percentile in CBSE Boards, marks corresponding to 140000 is just ridiculous.

You know most people don't clearly know about the details of this formula and how it is going to be applied, hence no court case has been done as yet.

arnav said...

dear sir
referring to your reply to vinod kumar sharma's comment (13 may 2013 at 8:13 pm) . Your answer was more of a philosophical one ,forced by the government and not having any mathematical and intellectual reasoning . Now coming to your statement of giving board topper admission to NITs . If its so then why not give them direct admission like in bits pilani and follow the same old procedure of admission forthe rest (on jee mains merit) . Sir please thin of some change in the normalization formula because many average ranker students will be badly affected

arnav said...

dear sir
referring to your replay to vinod kumar sharma's comment (13 may 2013 at 8:13 pm ) . I found your answer to be more of a philosophical one, forced by the government and not having any mathematical and intellectual reasoning . Now talking on the other issue , as you said the government wants board toppers to be admitted to NITs . what about the jee mains topper . If he secured just 60% in board does he stand any chance ?

aaa said...

Dheeraj Sanghi Sir,

I would request your frank views on the issues brought out above by learned bloggers. Well, the things are getting complicated every day. The moot point is if a student scores 2 % more in the boards which are equivalent to 10 marks (CBSE- 5 subjects each for maximum marks 100), how can one even think of giving 40-50 marks extra by normalisation. the impression given was 40% weightage to board marks which in the above case implied 4 marks (10x.40)in ideal sense. Yes this figure of 4 marks can be multiplied by a factor to bring a particular board to a standard board say CBSE. I am sure this figure then will vary say from 1 to 10 or so and that should be the difference between two students having a diffrence of 2% marks in their board results. Well, the formula adopted seems to be out of this world and probably would need to be applied for aliens rather than students.

Unknown said...

let us join hands to fight it in court for justice if you agree let us be fast and make it a mass movement

Shishir said...

To be fair to him pls do not expect Shri Dheeraj to openly go against the procedure finalized by a Govt committee (of which he was a member too).
The only option left is Legal Recourse as the formula is certainly against the declared public policy of providing 40% weight to Board Marks.
Also we must spread awareness about this abnormal normalisation in other Fora also.

Anonymous said...

I accept there are some anomalies in this system but I think this is the best way to balance the school system and the entrance system.Here people are worried that students will suffer but actually a person who is well rounded and has done good in both the exams(CBSE and jee main)should be given a seat and not to a person doing well in just one of these exams..The only reason people are getting because they were not able to get good results and now they blame others for their lack of hardwork.So please I would request such people to concentrate on their work rather than blaming the system if normalization.

Not yet! said...

@ everyone. This needs to be taken to court.

@ mastermind, I don't you have even had a look at how unfair this system is. This is not giving 40% weightage but is giving 400% weightage to a select few thousands of students. The others will lose dramatically.

People please promote other posts too. And spread the news. I hope Arnab Goswami takes it up :)..

Kots said...

@Mastermind
Agree with most of the comments. Some of the things that the Government should have done before initiating any change is
1. Have a common syllabus and examination across all boards. The top 20 percentile range is quite large acros boards. Now , people who would not be eligible for IIT in past system will be eligible because of 20Percentile and in other boards it is vice versa.
2. Fairness - in some boards papers are leaked before the examinations. SO what is the sanctity of those results.
3. They can even Normalize the abnormal values that would come up during the Normalization. like if a student gets 99% in a board but gets only 115 in JEE, they need to reconsider giving the marks as per normalizaion that would be more than 280 for B1 and B0. Similarly reduce if the student does well in JEE and not that well in Board exams.
It doesn't make sense to implement things without data to back the assumptions.
To bring up such a Normalization formula after the results are declared is ridiculous.

gautam barua said...

I am fully in agreement with all those who say that this is an absurd formula. The "original" proposal was to directly take the percentile rank and use it as a score out of 100 for Board marks. As I have argued in detail, this would have had practically no impact on deciding the successful candidates as the spread in the JEE (mains) will dominate the percentile scores which will be bunched. In fact I had stated that there was likely to be at most a 4 mark difference (90 per centile vs 99 percentile times 0.4) in most realistic cases. What we have now has been stated eloquently by so many of you.
Now, the argument against the "original" proposal was that you cannot compare apples with oranges. But, as I have already argued, a) both the JEE(main) marks and the percentile ranks are numbers. Surely numbers can be compared; b) IITs have been doing this kind of comparison for umpteen years! GATE scores were percentiles and we had to give 70% weightage to them and we gave 30% weightage to the test students took at our institute. Almost always, the local test determined who got in. But the GATE score was important (and the Board percentile here is too) as is puts pressure on students to do well and it determined the stream they got in some cases. With IIT selection and branch selection, this pressure is real in JEE. So students will try to do well in their Board exams, but if they falter, the price is not very high.
Gautam Barua, Director IITG.

Not yet! said...

Sir Barua,

With all due respect, I have myself been a JEE 2005 ranker and graduated at a reasonably well known institute in India, at Pilani, and I'm upset this system is so preposterous.

It is ofcourse not an issue that board marks were to be included in the final score and that oranges must be added to oranges.

The problem lies in the fact that in case of JEE Main written marks, the range of marks drops suddenly from 330+ at 99.5%ile to 80 at 96 - 97%ile.

This brings in a mark difference of
0.4 * (330 - 80) which is 92.

So someone who has scored 91% marks in CBSE (and lands up at 96%ile) is given 92 marks short of someone who has scored 96% and is at 99.5ile.

Do you see the problem. Most of the JEE marks are concentrated in the percentile of 97%ile to 100%ile, whereas so is not the case in Boards, where the numbers decrease smoothly.

In trying to put oranges with oranges, the system is extremely unfair.

The 'original' system you mentioned is fair, coz 25 marks in boards should correspond to 25 marks in boards, and the effect should not get multiplied multiple times just so that everyone feels that yes boards have an importance.

Regards,
Kshitij

santanudey said...

@ Prof. Gautam Barua

Sir, Kindly request the authorities to go back to the original formula.Or atleast request the private colleges like IIIT(H),DAICT,BITS(MESRA) to consider the JEE(Mains) marks only.

Unknown said...

Why not we first send representation to CBSE bringing out the anamoly and simultaneously take legal recourse as this is going to be atom bomb when final result is declared, most of top/good JEE scorers getting blown away and replaced by people getting low JEE score but in 99 percentile bracket- GREAT UNJUSTICE.
Some fast action is needed.
menghnani

abinash swain said...

sir can you please answer:
for calculating percentile 'P' , the students of all eligible 2011, 2012 and 2013 students of a particular board will be taken or only that batch students will be considered to which a candidate belongs ????

Unknown said...

@Mastermind… I am just a graduate and not statistics wizard to understand that the process of equating “oranges” to ‘oranges” but it actually jumbled “Donkeys” with “Horses”. Your assumption of giving advantage to the best board candidate not performing in one exam (here JEE-Main) does not justified. Because, look at the AP board performers majority (more than 75%) above 90%ile actually failed to cross the cut-off mark of 113 @ JEE-Main. I suspect there will be several suicides by the depressed students after the ranks being published. Time is short to correct this blunder.

Unknown said...

Sir,I have given the jee-mains exam this year and cbse board exams.
I got 88.2 % which I didn't expect.
CBSE just distributes marks like nothing. There are more than 42000 students who got more than 90% this year.I see a lot of confusion around.
In my opinion CBSE should give more time to this issue and apply the normalization procedure from the next year in which no one gets any kind of privilege over others .

Unknown said...

@not yet!
u r makin assumptions out of no where...a person gettin 99.5 percentile in his/her board will be gettin the mark corresponding to rank 7k in jee main that is 240......0.5% of 14lac.....and a candidate getting percentile 96 will be gettin the score corresponding to rank 56k.that is 140......difference is 0.4x(240-140)=40.........i know score will be amplified but the difference of 92 marks btw 99.5 and 96 percentile is not possible.......

santanudey said...

@ C Sunil Kumar
In A.P I know many students who got 97-98% ( which keeps them with in 1 percentile)in Board exam but got only 40-50 in JEE Mains. With is new normalised formula they are hoping to get admission in some NITs.This is absolutely crazy formula.And I am rather surprised to note that no body is bothered.May be this new formula will give some benefits to the coaching institutes.

Not yet! said...

@nisha,

Thanks for pointing the subtlety.

I might have been a little lax with the precision I agree.

But I would like you to have a look at an example given on the official website(which I think takes the last year scores).

http://jeemain.nic.in/jeemain2013/pdf/Normalisation_Formula_v8_2013.pdf

Have a look at page No. 5.

96.81%ile corresponds to 80 marks (at the all India level).

Since they did not have data for 99.5%ile, I took that number from the other page No. 6 sheet (which actually corresponds only to the particular board they have chosen for the example).

99.56%ile corresponds to 338 marks.

Well maybe at All India level, 99.56%ile will come down to 250-300 marks, I'm not so sure.

But the difference of a mere 25 marks in boards, which should have gotten a weightage of about 10 marks (0.4*25), will get exaggerated by atleast 400% - 1000% is what I can see.

Unknown said...

@nisha adhikari
hhighest score unofficailly known is 345, and officially known score for 75000 rank in JEE(MAIN) is 113.Now 75000 rank in JEE(MAIN) corresponds to 93.5 percentile in JEE(MAIN) as total candidates appeared in JEE(MAIN) is 1153000.So in just 6.5 percentile gap anchored jee(main) marks difference created will be 0.4X(345-113)=92. for CBSE 92 percent is equal to 93.5 percentile whereas topper has got 98 percent , as such gap of 6 percent i.e. 30 marks is creating gap of 92 marks in final JEE score.In a exam of maximum 360 marks , 92 marks(about 25percent) are lost by mere 6 percent less marks in boards . So roughly in top bracket 1 percent fall in board marks is equal to about 14 marks fall in final jee score. HOW can one bridge this?

Kots said...

Has the CBSE declared the mark vs percentile table for JEE 2013? CBSE has given some statistics for XII class results in the website.
If that is available we can know the approx impact of Board percentile on JEE Ranks. I suspect 95 - 80 percentile people would be bunched in a small interval of 150-113 marks.

pc said...

What is the justification for the assumption that such cases would not arise?
Instead of implementing such a dubious proposition immediately, one, two or three years could have been spent collecting and analyzing data, and evolving a provably correct formula, which would survive the tests of such questions. Meanwhile admissions could have been carried out according to the old system. For example, this year, the proposed formula could be tried out in parallel, without actual implementation. The lists could be examined in detail, and a better formula, if required could be worked out. This process could be iterated till a formula which stood the test of acceptability is reached, and subsequently implemented from the succeeding year, after informing the candidates a year in advance.
It is not clear why there is an undue hurry to implement an untested idea, and make students of a particular year guinea pigs of the experiment.

Sanjeev said...

Dear Mr.Sanghi,
Is it possible to go for a forced frequency distribution by taking CBSE as the base board (only because it happens to be the largest board in terms of number of students).

Say for example, 6% of the CBSE students score between 100% & 90%, say 20% score between 80% & 90% and so on.

Now, we equate any other board, say AP Board, by considering their top 6% students as scoring between 90% to 100% (distributing them proportionately), next 20% students to be proportionately (based on their marks) distributed between 80% to 90% & so on.

This way i consider, all the boards will get an equal weightage which shall be equal to that of CBSE. At the end we have all the students with a equalised board %. Multiply the equalised Board % with 0.4 (weightage for the Board)

As a second step, work out the % of the marks obtained by a candidate in JEEMAIN. say 198/360 = 55%, multiply this by 0.6 (weightage for jeemain)

Add the equalised Board % and the JEEMAIN %. The resultant no. is the final % or score out of 100 for the candidate. All the scores may then be ranked.

This way, we equalise the Boards and give predetermined weightage to both Jeemain as well the Board without trying to equate apples with oranges.

I do not know if this is too late to adopt, but i feel that the suggested formula is significantly less anomalous then what has been declared by jeemain authorities.
rgds.

Unknown said...

The normalisation formula is very dangerous it is going to be a real autombomb in students life.
As explained above we canot compare the size of students of Boards (i.e max of 1.5 Lakhs)with JEE Mains size of students (i.e 11.50 Lakhs)for percentile system. which severly damage the fate of students who got good marks in JEE with equally good % i.e 95% in Boards. kindly think twice and defer the formula this year and take much time to introduce a good formula and announce atleast two years in advance.

Unknown said...

@notyet
96.81 percentile means 3.19 percent students are ahead of u.......14lac students gave jee main this year....simply calculate 3.19 % of 14lac......which i guess is equal to 43k.....corresponding jee main mark for the candidate wud be 150.....and not 80.....cbse has just com up with an example....
@suresh
previous year statistics show 84.5 percentage correspond to 90 percentile......then for 92 percent u can expect the percentile to be greater than 97.5.......cbse must hav gone through all the negatives and positives of the so called procedure......inspite of that i think it has more negatives than positives.....

Not yet! said...

@nisha,

I don't know where you are getting your numbers from, but i believe it is from the example CBSE has come out with.

http://jeemain.nic.in/jeemain2013/pdf/Normalisation_Formula_v8_2013.pdf

Have a look at page No. 5.

96.81%ile corresponds to 80 marks (at the all India level), and 150 marks (in board ABCD as given on page 6.)

I believe that CBSE board will be much closer to the all india level anyways because of the number of students giving CBSE.

Muhammed said...

@mastermind
I am sure, at the end of the day we don't want to weigh someone's hardwork after making unnecessary deductions comparing it with his friends' hardwork (obviously from the same board)

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

Considering all the comments above, I can just say the following:

1. It is absurd to normalize marks across diverse boards. I continue to believe that board marks should not be used for ranking for admission.

2. Because such problems were anticipated last year by some of us, we had proposed as a compromise formula to use only 10% weight of board marks, if anything had to be done, and then increase that weight every year, based on experience of the first year.

3. We had also suggested that if such a scheme had to be used the AIEEE (now JEE Mains) should have a different structure. It should be what we called a "public" exam, which was to have a more uniform distribution of marks rather than a selection test with a long tail.

4. We had also suggested that there should be aptitude component in JEE Mains (which, in retrospect, would have made JEE Mains a much better exam to compare board marks against), but that was not to be.

5. So the committee was asked to do something impossible. I have only tried to see what best can be done in such adverse situation.

6. Most of the suggestions above are inherently assuming that all boards are equal, which is a political statement and I can not possibly agree with it.

7. As I have said in the blog, comparing the percentiles and then giving scores was suggested by several statisticians, and opposed by none in several committees prior to our committee, and these experts included those who were on either side of the debate last year.

8. All the problems that have been pointed out are essentially mapping a different distribution (of board marks) to a long tail distribution of JEE Mains marks, which is unfair only because the method and its implications were not known to students. If the method and its implications were known a year ago, students who expect to be in the top 10 percentile of board marks would have worked much more for the board than for JEE (perhaps). But please note that ANY formula given out in May would have that problem that students did not know about it. And hence the Government should not have changed the system in such a great hurry.

9. Any formula (other than a type which has very minor or no impact of 12th class marks on the final ranking) would have complaints. So the only real solution is to just use JEE marks as ranks. But I doubt if that will stand legal scrutiny for CFTIs. For non-CFTIs, during the year I had suggested to many institutes to use just JEE marks, because even without this, there are just far too many issues with the new system.

10. I think a legal challenge this late in the game would not succeed. But I am sure there will be people going to courts on lots of issues this year, not just this one.

Please continue discussing this. I am not likely to respond, as I am extremely busy at this time.

gautam barua said...

Dheeraj,
That was a very poor justification for the mess your committee has created. You are now blaming the whole idea of including Board marks for the mess. You cannot do that when you agreed to be in a committee which came out with this formula. You have not answered why the "original" scheme was not left as it is (apples and oranges is a poor argument; please elaborate how it would have been unfair). Point 9 of your post says:
9. Any formula (other than a type which has very minor or no impact of 12th class marks on the final ranking) would have complaints. So the only real solution is to just use JEE marks as ranks. But I doubt if that will stand legal scrutiny for CFTIs. For non-CFTIs, during the year I had suggested to many institutes to use just JEE marks, because even without this, there are just far too many issues with the new system.
But the "original" formula fits the bill as far as the first sentence is concerned! Why was it dumped? The proposal was suggested anticipating precisely the uncertainties among students in the first year and so the idea was to gradually and minimally bring in Board marks into the picture in the first round. Aptitude questions, etc would have been brought in, in later years.
So it makes me wonder what is going on?
Gautam Barua

aaa said...

Dheeraj Sir,

very nice of you to have taken time for giving a brief of what u feel. there will be a no of students and parents going to court this year on this issue of normalisation. Notwithstanding the formuale announced, is it possible for you to put across the views on this blog to some of the people who matter to get them thinking. well it defies logic as to how difference of 10 marks in boards could lead to difference of 40-50 marks by normalisation and it also defies logic that our dear statisticians and other committee members could not see this much.Statisticians are statisticians and for them only numbers matter.

I hope better sense would prevail and some sort of cap in No of marks at various percentile differences between students would be worked out to limit the damage and restrict weightage of board marks to 40% or so as originally desired.

santanudey said...

Prof. Barua and Prof Sanghi

Please do whatever you can do to clear this mess.Future of thousands of students is depending on this.

Prashant said...

In case someone is interested, the ISC percentage to percentile mapping is here.

A similar mapping for CBSE will be available in 2 days.

I am a data engineer by profession with an interest in the education space, and apart from trying to figure out academic issues at school level across the country, I thought it was necessary that such basic info should be available to the public, specially when these marks carry so much importance now.

If any academic is interested in looking at (almost) complete webcrawl of CBSE/ISC data (made anonymous) please let me know.

My take: you should not be using these marks in the first place. Different subjects have significantly different national averages and different distributions. Assigning a percentile to a student becomes fairly arbitrary this way, doesn't his college/branch selection get influenced by factors beyond his/her control this way?

Using some cutoff like 20-30 percentile is still more reasonable.

venugopal rao said...

Dear Sir,
I am fully in agreement with all those who say that this is a absurd formula. Firstly, we need to highlight the issue and injustice done to the merit students in the print and electronic media. The Normalisation procedure for Board marks given at JEE Main site amounts to Board level (State) quotas, which is a gross violation of equality before law, since the present admission policy of NIT/CFTIs already fulfills 50% seats for Home State and 50% seats reserved for OBC/SC/ST as part of social inclusion policy. The method is unlawful and added another system of reservations for States. If they implement the JEE MAIN Normalisation formula, it affects the careers of best brains in the country, demoralize them because it’s implications were not known to the students and NIT/CFTIs will lose their academic reputation. I request the concerned to take up the issue in a big way and launch a nationwide campaign to sensitize all the stakeholders to change/remove the unjust Normalisation procedure adopted by the CBSE/JAB, which is going to affect the fate of thousands of bright scientific minds of the country.
The only recourse left is filing petitions in various High Courts throughout the country. Parents and concerned people/organizations have to come together through social media in their respective States to pool financial/legal material resources and should be fought legal battle by employing eminent jurists. We need to share legal material with concerned parents/organizations to strengthen our cause. Our ultimate aim should be removal of Board marks in JEE MAIN 2013 and ranking should be through JEE MAIN scores only.
Looking forward to your views,
Best regards,
Prof C. V. Rao

Unknown said...

Today we tried to communinicate to Chairman CBSE through someone that Normalisation formula is absurd. I am told that he wanted brief on that . I would request someone to prepare brief so that we can hand it over to chairman CBSE for further action.
suresh menghnani
menghnani@gmail.com

Unknown said...

All respected sir...
Please take some steps asap.This year cbse students get marks like nothing..as i passed out in 2012 i know whats the value of single marks in board.I scored 192 this year but inspite of this i think i will not come even in top 20000.please at least private colleges like bit mesra and thapar should consider only jeemain score.there are many students like me.our dreams will gonna crushed bt this method.

Unknown said...

may please send brief/objections with examples directly to chairman CBSE on mail ID chmn-cbse@nic.in

Shishir said...

@Suresh
Before seeing your latest posting,I had already Emailed you an article and a Excel graph for needful.

santanudey said...

@Shishir
Would you kindly mail me the article and the graph ?

santanuday@gmail.com

Not yet! said...

I have dropped in an email explaining the problem. It'll be good if others too do so. Should make some impact.

Kshitij

Shishir said...

@santanudey
Mailed at id given.But your id seems to differ from blog handle ("day" against "dey").pls check

Unknown said...

The five subjects chosen for this year’s normalization of class XII marks does not represent the true potential of students. Subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and English are the core subjects for all the science students. By having a fifth subject will in fact skew the marks as there are wide choice of easier subjects like physical education are available which are generally preferred by many students. Hence this fifth subject will definitely alter the normalization process and against the law of natural justice because of marks of different subjects are not comparable. In few boards where only 4 subjects are there, only marks of these 4 subjects shall be considered as an exception in this year as confirmed by JEE Main board. In view of the above, it is necessary to consider only four subjects should be chosen for normalization Procedure for Class XII board marks.

Neeraj said...

I have also written a mail explaining the whole issue with its drawbacks in the normalisation system to Human Resources Minister, Chairman CBSE amongst others. I have not received any response. I have made a tabular comparison of noramalised marks at various percentiles which shows that the system is highly biased towards the board toppers (say the top two percentile. i am not able to paste my table here due to formatting problems. If the moderator can give me his id I would mail the same to him. My ID neerajmehrotra@hotmail.com

Unknown said...

Consider the following example:
Student A who wrote in AP boards got 300/360 in JEE main and 525/530 (99%) (99.99 percentile, being state topper)in boards exam.
Student B who also wrote in AP boards got 300/360 in JEE main and 506/530 (95.5%) (93.2 percentile)in boards exam.
After normalization,
Student A: 0.6*300 + 0.4*345 =318
Student B: 0.6*300 + 0.4*113 =225
Thus B is at a loss of 93 marks (93/360= 26%)for a difference of 3.5% marks in boards exam.
Alas!!!. CBSC brains!!! If you can't realize this anomaly, You are doing a gross injustice to the little hearts. Stop this non sense.
It is very likely in AP board exams, where the papers are easy, correction is liberal, Most of the students of different calibres accumulate between 500 and 525. Thus the percentile is solely depend on luck, a liberal evaluator gives more marks and a tough evaluator gives less marks. It is very possible that a good student go down about 3.5% for no mistake of him, but for the mistake of the evaluator (Who is not at all qualified)
If the loss is minimal, no body bothers, but if the loss is so huge, you are all culprits.Think twice before going ahead.
Raja Sekhar.

aaa said...

it seems that chorus to discard the normalisation formulae is growing and rightly so.

See how CCE system has been given a thumbs up by highlighting that pass %age of students and students scoring more than 90% has increased for class X exams. the batch currently embroiled in all the test cases of CBSE (which gave the clas 12 exam in Mar 13)also has done well with no of students both above 90 as well as 95% increasing. This CCE system encourgaes grades and to take an example, students with 91 to 100% marks are given A1 grade. And what do we have from the same CBSE in class 12, that even 1% marks in class 12 will make or mar your future for all times to come. CBSE and all the people associated with it including MHRD do not have even this much sympthathy for students to at least announce whatever dreaded formulaes and rules that they have in their minds in time that is before the boards.

I hope CBSE will announce marks and corresponding percentile for each 0.1 percentile for class 12 marks and also do the same for JEE Main so that students are clear what is their percentile in boards and corresponding marks in JEE Main and that where they stand well before All India Ranks are declared in July. That may prompt the people who matter to understand the problem better.

Unknown said...

Consider the following two examples who wrote exam in Board of Intermediate in AP:
Student A got 300/360 in mains and 525/530 (99%, 99.99 percentile)
Student B got 300/360 in mains and 506/530 (95.5%, 93.2 percentile)
After normalization:
Student A: 0.6*300 + 0.4*345 = 318
Student B: 0.6*300 + 0.4*113 = 225
Student B is at a loss of 93 marks (93/360 = 26%) for having got a less percentage of 3.5% (99-95.5)in boards. A difference of 3.5% is very likely for the students of same calibre in boards like AP where the papers are easy, evaluation is liberal and evaluators are private lecturers who do not know subject and where most of the students congregate between 95 to 99% of marks.
Are we not playing a dangerous game with young brains!! Please understand that 26% of difference is not because of the difference in students' calibre, but because of inefficiency of liberal boards.
Raja Sekhar

santanudey said...

TOI has published an article on the board normalization . Share it in the social media platforms as much as you can.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/Normalization-puts-premium-on-Board-results-makes-JEE-Main-redundant/articleshow/20355373.cms

Ak_amazing said...

sir, i am not qualified enough to propose a solution for the future of lakhs of students, but i am one of those who are at loss, i have 185 in boards and 88% in CBSE which is a decent score if not good, but acording to new method my rank is going to fall drastically, and what makes it worse is the fact that i am a drop out, i put all my efforts for improving my marks, and %age(i had given the boards again) but will end up getting nothing.
1 simple way out can be that We can accept a board to be standard for calculating 40%, say that board is CBSE.
now take the percentile of all boards, and the percentile of CBSE board, arrange the students according to percentile score combined together. multiply them by 3.6 to get it along the scale of jee main, and now multiply this marks by .4 and add to the .6*JEE MAIN score and prepare a rank list out of 360.
This solves most imp. problems like difficulty of various boards, and making the units same.
moreover this gives exact 40% weightage to boards.
there is less irregularity in marks at various percentile in boards than JEE MAIN [1 percentile =200 marks, 6 percentile = 115 marks :(]
Please consider this if you can help even a bit Please try. i see that u are associated with JEE, therefore its my appeal to you for my future, and many others like me.

Unknown said...

Hi,
The very basis of board marks deciding the fate of students is absurd. In such case JEE main could have been totally done away with and students would have then focussed on only boards and normalization as being suggested could have been fine tuned as being done now.
The irony is after going through the grind of JEE spending countless hours the students gets a good score and then comes to know his efforts have gone waste just because of an irresponsible and self proclaimed politician who has played havoc with their carrers by forcing unscientific thinking through his diktats.
The end result is that instead of reducing burden on students he has succeded in giving them undue tension and stress leading to deterioration of their health.
The best solution in this case will be in my view as follows:a schematic example but can be finetuned
JEE score: 180
"Compute the board percentile - B0 as suggested" say 95
Multiply his JEE main score with that percentile (figure) say (180 *95=171)
Now compute : (180*0.6 + 171*0.4)=108+68.4=176.4.
2nd example:
JEE : 240
Board: 85 percentile -B0
Final score: ( 240*0.6 + 204*0.4)= 144+81.6=225.6
3rd example:
JEE: 190
Board: 95 percentile-B0
Final score: (190*0.6 +189.5 *0.4)=189.8
This will give the student the benefit to keep his JEE score if he/ she is excellent in boards too, otherwise make a dent in their score but not give any undue advantage to top performers in boards who have faired very poorly in JEE main.
This way talent can be spotted and also relevance of JEE will remain. Formula can be fine tuned by experts to give a correct ranking and not cause any undue advantage or damage to good performers in JEE.
This is a suggestion since the mess has already been created this year and a respectable / practical solution need be brought out.

Kots said...

@Prashant

Do you have the marks vs percentile table for JEE like the one given in the ISC. I yes request email to kotaiah.tella@gmail.com

my view is to go back to old system with out any reference to any board marks. We can consider changes only when the systems are streamlines.

abinash swain said...

GENTLEMEN::
#you are all talking about the difference in marks between a 99 percentile and 95 percentile student...that is right...but everything depends on rank...though there is a huge difference in marks there will never be a huge difference in all india rank....obviously a bunch of students securing good mark in jee main and also in board i.e, 99.9 percentile { obviously they are better than 96 percentile students) will get good ranks ....
# a student performing good either only in jee main or only in the boards will not secure good rank. he or she has to perform good in both.
# you cant claim that a 95 percentile ( 90% in cbse) student is averagely good and worthy to get into nits easily.
# in DELHI UNIVERSITY cutoff for different colleges are also 99% in boards....there you cant complain to get a seat securing 90% in boards claiming that my ward is not a bad student...!!!
# its all about competition and seats are limited...if a lot of students are securing above 90% in boards then we have to choose certain best among those best students for those limited seats...!!!

Unknown said...

@Prof. Barua, Prof Sanghi and the respected team (the formulae invention team)... Below is a suggestion made at one of the blogs….
The best solution to the problem is eliminate all those candidates who have not qualified while calculating the percentiles. There are two qualifications a candidate should have to get admission through JEE. 1) 50% aggregate marks in Board exam. 2) Minimum qualifying marks in JEE(Main) exam as it was being done all these years in AIEEE. Now the percentiles should be calculated amongst only those candidates who meet both the above qualifying criteria. This will eliminate the skew in the dataset of JEE Main exam as more than 85% students will be removed from the dataset who will be considered as NOT QUALIFIED. For example, if JEE Main total of say 100 is considered as qualified, this will have around 1.50 Lakh students only and the percentile should be based on the scores of these students only. We should note here that there will be more than two lakh students who might have scored negative marks (not even zero) and all those students are being considered in the calculation of the percentile. Similarly the percentile calculation for various boards should be done only for those students who have scored 50% or more marks. I want to make a point here that when a student has not even qualified, then why he is there in the list. However the best way is not to give any weightage to the BOARDS.

andy said...

TOI article has very clearly shown the dangerous useless formula of normalisation , which will very badly affect the career of the students. i hope author and students and parents will unite and take up this matter further

one thing which is also very important is that this faulty formula will prove a boon for the private colleges and create a great confusion and mental and financial harrasment to the students and parents .
according to this faulty formiula , even a good scorer in jee mani will not be able to assess his final ranking before 7th july. now all these private institutes which have taken their own entrance tests have fixed their counselling dates in may and june .
now the student will be forced to attend their counselling and book their seats after paying the fees in the tune of 2 lakh rupees, because of the utter confusion.
so it will be boon for these colleges . because after wards on the refund of the fees , they will deduct quite substantial amount.

andy said...

taken from TOI , comment by
Meenakshi Giri (Bangalore) 22 hrs ago
I agree with the author , the normalization process is indeed faulty. I do agree that 12th class board marks are important but the way the normalization is impacting the overall result is wrong. I would request the author to take up the issue to next level. Let the jee main examination authority realize that they have made a huge mistake , correct it and be fair to thousands of student who have worked hard for preparing for the entrance exam and at the same time done reasonably well in their board exams. This normalization formula has been announced at a very late stage without proper study of the actual data. Please do not play with the future of young , bright minds. Every single mark is important in deciding the rank, institute and branch for the student. Let the issue come up in a big way in print and visual media. Let there be justice

Unknown said...

The Board marks depend on various factors such as mood, type and ability of the examiner. So slight variations do happen in board marks for students of same calibre. This shouldnot spoil the chances of a student for ever. In the proposed normalization procedure slight variation in board marks in upper brackets are causing wide variations in JEE ranks. So this procedure must be discarded immediately and some new procedre which gives lesser weightage and direct weightage to board marks without percentile mapping on JEE marks needs to be evolved. Otherwise the toppers in JEE main may get ranks in thousands.
karunakarhyd@gmail.com

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Muhammed said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Save trees 2 day said...

the best way to normalize the score would be the following :
Let the candidates percentile in his/her respective board be P,JEE Main score J.

the total score should be equal to
0.6*J + 0.4*(P*360)

Kots said...

@Prashant

Do you have any table for JEE Mains? Even an approax data would help us to decide.

If you have please email me at kotaiah.tella@gmail.com

Prashant said...

For those interested, the CBSE-Class 12 percentage to percentile mapping table for 2013 are here.

It is based on the data of 7L students (rather than all the 9L) and minor offsets were added to interpolate and fit the 80 percentile point specified by CBSE.

Unknown said...

the normalisation process adopted is only increasing tension and depression among students and their parents. jig members and govt is solely responsible for this. immediate action is required to remove foolish normaliosation

Vaibhav said...

I hv scored 187 in jee mains. i never knew that they would come up with such a formula. i hv got 85% in ISC.
this means 85 percentile in jee main. 187*0.6 + 0.4(0.5*(75+85)) = 144.
My career is ruined. i wont even appear in the top 30.000 . I hv done well in WBJEE. A govt college is must for me. i would hv got NIT DURGAPUr.
someone tell me how to stop them from ruining our career. An Engineering aspirant has to join a coaching or take tutions from good teachers to become eligible for the best engi. colleges. Boards requires memorising the concepts whereas Engi. Entrance exams checks your application of concepts. This is a simple idea. Students who dont want to work hard find it easy to score more than 90% in boards and get away. more than 2% of candidates pay for rechecking and revaluation of marks in boards every year. many students accept whatever they get. BESIDES EVERYTHING POSTED IN THIS BLOg , I WANT TO REQUEST YOU PEOPLE TO GUIDE ME SO THAT I CAN CONTRIBUTE TO STOP THIS NONSENSE. i will do anything to save myself and the likes of me.

Not yet! said...

Since the JEE normalisation formula was declared so late in the day, (May 2013 is what I have understood), I think it can be challenged in the Judiciary.

Any updates from any side?

Not yet! said...

@Vaibhav,

You need to file a PIL. Most of your exams must be over. I personally think this formula will not stand by the Supreme court and will have to be reversed to 'status quo' which was there in last year, because it was declared so late in the day, even after the conduct of boards and JEE Mains.

It is absolutely ridiculous.

Maybe you can approach some lawyer or maybe Prashant Bhushan from Aam Aadmi Party, though I doubt he'll have the time. Hope we can reverse this in time..

Ashish said...

I have still not understood the case when CBSE was taken a year back. Will the percentile be calculated based on last year's results or the same marks will be applied to this year's CBSE population.

This is relevant as the marks spread seems different over two years.

Prashant said...

Someone has done this very nice analysis quite clearly. I think this should convince everyone that Dr. Sanghi is perfectly right when he says that slowly introduce board scores with not more than 10% weightage.

http://deedy.quora.com/Hacking-into-the-Indian-Education-System

Unknown said...

IIT - hyderabad took corrective action. Now they will only count JEE(MAIN) marks for merit.
Some effect of representations.
But I think ultimate solution can only come through legal remedy as CBSE is unlikely to review its own formula due to individuals ego, mostly prevelant in system.
Prof. Sanghi and Prof. barua can show us the way .

Unknown said...

@All
We should start file petitions and take the help of “save Education forums” like - http://www.educationforumindia.net
(Address to fairnessineducation@gmail.com ; jayantbj@gmail.com )

Save trees 2 day said...

Please write a letter to institutes like DTU or NSIT to change their selection procedure and consider JEE MAIN scores for selection.

I have written a letter, please you also write.

It will save lives of hundreds of students

Not yet! said...

@ Suresh, this is great news (slight correction: IIIT-H).

Some real effect of our work coming on the fore. I had also written to atleast 10 professors of IIITH to consider only JEE Main marks, indeed heartening, words are being heard.

Hope more of us put representations to different colleges, which can then follow suit.

Unknown said...

very niiiiiiiice formula.I think cbse and govt has taken right steps in order to close that useless coachings as competition in both board and jee main equally tough but earlier it gone in the favour of aieee coachings.rewards will be ours school board toppers and you all groans nothing can be happen now its too late!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Unknown said...

Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi & Prof. Gautam Barua…
Still 99% of the eligible NIT aspirants were not aware of the implications of their ranks due to this faulty / absurd formula. It will be a mess after the ranks being declared and put these aspirants future in trouble.
Pl act and stop the menace.

Muhammed said...

What if we consider the percentile ranking of a student in his board and jee main say B&J resp. and calculate the score for ranking as 0.4×B+0.6×J???

Muhammed said...

I think you have ignored the fact that we have different boards in our country while stating some of the points

aaa said...

Well, it is well established that the normalisation formulae worked out by CBSE along with JIG is not based on data/logic. Well they seem to have considered a lot of options for the sake of going through the process and finalised so called best option that has been given out as the normalisation formulae.
At the cost of repetition and sounding boring, let me make an attempt to list out the assumptions.
1. All boards across the countries are equal irrespective of syllabi, faculty, infrastructure etc.
2. Native intelligence ( a term which I have read somewhere and which sounds very convincing) is spread in the same ratio across the spectrum of students in all boards.
3. Each subject has equal weightage be it physics, chemistry, sociology, computer science, economics etc etc. That is percentile is to be calculated for all students be it commerce, art or science stream in a board. How illogical????
4.Boards whether they give aggregate marks based on only 12 th Class or both for 11th and 12th class are same.
5.All boards irrespective of number of students in that board are equal.
6. A student will do as well in JEE mains as he has done in boards in terms of percentile irrespective of number of students in his board (for CBSE, it is 880000 approximately and for JEE Main it is 1100000 approximately, this will vary for various boards)
7. The capability to score in boards with respect to all the students in that board (that is percentile) will remain same even in an open all india level examination like JEE Main (that is in terms of percentile)
8. A student who gets only say 70 percentile in JEE Main can be given weightage of 99 percentile in JEE Main itself based on his percentile in boards. (this assumption beats me). This means that a students who has actually scored say 80 marks in JEE Main can be given a weightage of say 90 marks in JEE Mains based on his percentile in his boards. Wow what an assumption???
9. As all students are affected, it does not matter that rules are changed midway in 12th class and also the formula for normalisation can be announced after boards as well JEE Mains are over. Well it affects all so how does it matter is what they say? This assumption really kicks me.
10. Difficulty level of all sets of question papers are same and this is certified by CBSE on its website both for CBSE Class 12 as well JEE Main. Well, who decides the difficulty level>> the subject expert and not the students…
11. All evaluators are same in terms of intelligence and give similar marks for an answer in Class 12 . Well I have number of cases where students expected to get 95 got 85 and vice versa. So much for the consistency of evaluators of CBSE.

Hope to add some more ….

Unknown said...

Below review Prof. Deepak Gupta (IIT Kanpur) report

http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/views/JEE_Deepak.pdf

menghanivijay said...

Dear Sanghi Sir

Committee can revisit this issue suo motto and can suggest possible changes to CBSE. It can be done at this stage when all data is not published . Once data is published , it would be very difficult to review this for 2013 without alleged bias. The efforts being done by individual may be due to anger and emotional, but committee can take rational decision and there should not be any hesitation to accept mistake because even Supreme Court sometime reviews its own decision.

Unknown said...

All respected sirs,
All of you are in system,iit directors,professors,please take some step against this.This new system only promotes "Rattus" of boards.i accepted there are many deserving too but this will ruined many talented one's life too.why CBSE is still silent.We belongs to middle class and low class family.Also this year CBSE does checking so leniently that my friend who attempt 93 marks paper of mathematics got 95.whereas in 2012 board he did 98 marks paper and just got 78 marks.Also this weightage system announced after our board.If coaching system is so illegal then why shouldnt they pass the law against this.This system is fraud.We did hard work for govt college for our parents sake and advantages are taking others.i am sorry for being personal but this is the story of many more like me.

Not yet! said...

Here's a petition I have created. Please circulate it around and post into student and college communities.

http://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/cbse-chairman-vineet-joshi-ias-stop-highly-erroneous-normalization-for-cbse-jee-main-ranking-2013#share

Vaibhav said...

@ aaa, i completely agree with all your points. you hv greatly adressed all. Point number 11 is what i was going to post. Is there any chances of reverting this issue?

Vaibhav said...

To all respected professors, please comprehend the situation rationally. mistakes are to be rectified. Its not possible without your approach and the will to revert the methodology for admission. when we hv a transparent exam equal for all (JEE MAIN) , why do we hv to bring a change in the system? This not the way to help the rural population. This time they required more coaching stuff than before. for boards as well as jee main. the fact is they underperform in both the exams ( boards of jee main.) due to lack of good education quality. In this system , those who do very well in both exams will get the nits. there has to b a different approach. Sir pls address us on your blog as soon as possible. We dont hv much time :(

nishaanth said...

Sir, thanks for a lucid explanation behind the normalization process. This goes to show that its easy to point fingers at the administrators given the task at hand is so complex as this. Though I agree with most parts, I can't understand the rationale of mapping the board marks back to JEE Mains aggregate. The way I see is that the management assumes there is a strong correlation between both the marks. In that case, how is the inclusion of board marks adding anything to the table ? What intelligence is it testing which is not already evaluated by the common exam ?

Not yet! said...

I am reposting this petition. I don't know why it didn't get published the previous time.

Guys please spread it, and take it forward. You could start your own as well.

http://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/cbse-chairman-vineet-joshi-ias-stop-highly-erroneous-normalization-for-cbse-jee-main-ranking-2013

Regards,

Kshitij

Sunny said...

Dear everyone ,
It was interesting reading the blog and comments. I am amused as to how some guys start believing that they deserve to be in the best institutes just because they did well in JEE Main though did not fare well in their boards. Some of them have written that their 80% or so score in boards is a decent score ( though they don't make it to the top 20 % of their boards and expect to be welcomed in IITs ) . As we all know , most of the high scores in JEE are because of coaching institute efforts where the focus is not teaching the subject but how to crack the exam , focus is not to find the solution to the problem but rather how to quickly rule out the various options in the multiple choice questions. Where a normal student learns 100 formulae , the coaching institutes make their students cram 1000 formulae so that they solve the problem quickly . These students may not even be knowing how to derive these 1000 formulae from the basic 100 which is probably the real application of knowledge . It has been reasonably proven that the previous JEE system is flawed as none of our elite institutions have come up with even reasonable innovations in the past years as they are mostly being populated by breed of students who have focussed more on cracking the exam rather than real knowledge. The new system I feel is perfect. To come out of the objective test syndrome , a theoretical test is definitely required. Students would be burdened if an additional test was incorporated. Also it would be less fair if only one agency conducted all the tests as there would be risk of malpractices. In the present system seperate agencies are checking the papers, more importance is given to sound theoretical knowledge through board exams also importance is given to quick brains though they might only have been crammers who have been given adequate practice by coaching institutes . Then why crib . Accept it that the theoretical knowledge you displayed in your board exams is less than what is desired or what others have displayed and move ahead . The statisticians are indeed right in giving correct weightage to theory . Some have spoken of going to court. I think the case will not be able to stand legal scrutiny. The fault lies in the belief that the coaching institutes gave that the only gateway to success is quick solving of MCQs and theory be damned. Even they are correcting their strategies now. I know some of the prev comments were emotionally charged and am likely to get hate mails but facts are facts afterall. Regards and sincere good wishes to all

Ak_amazing said...

i have one simple nd logical question, does the board percentile include the students of other stream like commerce, humanities, arts, medical etc? if yes, then this is a big mistake, or stupidity..as the percentile of students getting 88-90% is being drastically affected by the students who have no relation with jee main exam, how can u combine such students for calculating percentiles? different boards have different percentage of students in streams like commerce. arts etc.CBS a scoring board has the largest no. of students from commerce nd most of the students fall in the 90-95% slab, which affects the percentile of students in non-med, and hence his JEE rank.
Its should be ensured that people scoring 88-91% in non-med do not suffer because of people scoring 90-95% in commerce, as they only have to study for boards, and have comparatively easier subjects.

Unknown said...

Those who are against the normalising formula must know that most of the students who are getting selected for NITs through AIEEE / JEE MAIN are joining Dummy schools and totally neglecting their Boards which is mandatory and concentrating only on competetive exams thus getting huge advantege in entrances over others who respect Boards and devote their time mostly to Boards. Thus there is no level playing ground. To sort out this making Board exams comepetetive by allotting percentiles and normalising the marks as done by CBSE is the only solution. One should also know that getting certain prescribed percentage is very easy depending on the Board they belong to. In such a situation if the formula as designed by the CBSE is not adopted the Board marks wouls be of no use. In fact many coaching centers asked their students to concentrate on JEE Main more and score more there so as to nullify the effect of 40% Board's weightage. If the presnt normalisaion is not adopted 60% of JEE MAIN score will almost entirely nullify 40% of Board's weightage which will be rediculous and the purpose of taking Board marks will not serve. On one hand you want ranks based on jee main marks and on the other you just want to add percentile scores of Board directly by taking 40% weightage without considering the rank of the student in their Board based on Board marks.

Secondly, Board has already infomed regarding the normalisation process well before the conducting of exams and even the formula was announced so many days ago. Based on this many students expecting overall good score did not join good private colleges. If the formula is changed suddenly it will be injustice to them and such an act will not stand be fore legal action. You can't cahnge rules in the Middle of the game.

Thirdly, please don't try to influence institutions. It will be injustice to some other students who have respected their Boards and sincerely devoted their time to both Board as well as Jee main.

Prashant said...

Hi.

Apart from worrying about normalization formulas I would like to point out the incorrectly tampered and distorted scoring patterns in the board examination marks.

Complete graphs of the ICSE-2013, ISC-Class 12-2013, ISC-Class 12-2012 and CBSE-Class 12-2013 have been plotted here.

CBSE Chairman should air his views on normalization after addressing the issue of curated scores first:

A detailed analysis is here:
http://www.thelearningpoint.net/home/examination-results-2013/exposing-cbse-and-icse

Clearer and hi-res plots have also been linked from the post.

Sunny said...

Further to my prev comment , it is not oranges and apples case . The unit applied is same ie knowledge in both the JEE and board marks normalisation. It is a scaling technique normally used to measure items which can't be measured directly eg IQ, aptitude etc and very commonly applied by psychologists. The only correction required apparently is to consider percentile of JEE marks instead of aggregate marks. We need to see it in right perspective-- what should be the QR for a good engineer, quick solving of MCQs or true knowledge, I am not saying that board exams are a true depiction of knowledge. Also the JEE exam is skewed in favor of those who have taken coaching, byhearted more formulae and practiced such papers and has nothing to do with true potential of a candidate. One way to offset this is to remove the unnecessary time pressure. Also probably we can have 2 tests with same syllabi and pattern instead of one to remove the bad day effect .

aaa said...

sunnyji,

well it is not clear from your above posts whether you are in favour of normalisation formulae or not. Best option is not to have weightage to board marks at all as it has so many assumptions. please refer my comments above on the assumptions.

For the sake of argument let us say that 40% weightage is to be given to board marks as declared by CBSE. Even then do u think that present normalisation formulae is giving 40% weightage to board marks ; it certainly is not doing that. Moreover, your contention that boards test theoretical knowledge of a student is out of sync. Also, students scoring good marks in JEE main are not muggers as u have brought out. some students will fall in that category though, but to generalise it for all students who go through coaching is not correct.

Well, under the present circumstances the best formulae would be to multiply jeemain percentile by 0.6 and board percentile by 0.4 and give the ranking based on overall percentile thus calculated. In this system, your own percentile comes into play in two different examination separately and there is no conversion from apples to oranges or oranges toapples.

also, for future, no board marks be considered. Give a student two chances within say a month in jee main and take the best out of two scores. that puts everyone at par. also, work towards common syllabus at least for core subjects across all the boards.

Unknown said...

@sunny I totally agreed that 80 per is not a decent score but its an average one.See iit nit never wants "Rattus".ok.because of these standard of nits are getting low.and these procedure brings the same system of selection.AS we know this 60-40 method introduces ib concern of saving the standard of nits and iits against their will..coaching institute should not be promoted but then the question which are asking in iit and nit should be given in cbse books na.all the students of a particular institute never craks these exams.pattern of jeemain and boards are totally different so students have no other option left.and if a student dont know about how to derive a formulae then how can he/she wiil derive formula of jee.yaar every student knows about derivation of boards but only knowledgable guy can crack the derivation based question of jee.also scoring of board is much easier if one has to focus only on boards as only repeated question comes.
And yes intersting thing is when i talked about this to my juniors,they told me that they are foccusing on their boards now and will take a drop next year.now what you conclude?is this system is acceptable?this also makes student to move towards coaching institute but by another way.
And please update your knowledge 60-40 pattern announced after 2012 boards.
And about myself,i am self a student of a reputed state government college studying EC.I never joined any coaching institue and prepare by myself.And i will not allow anyone to ruined my dreams.I will fight.

Sorry to all again for being personal.

menghanivijay said...

@sunny
Dear it is affecting more badly to the students who performed reasonably well in both like jee 200 (98 percentile) and board 93 % ( 96 percentile)' just because they could not get last two % I.e 95% ( 99 percentile) they need to suffer a lot. Your viiews are reasonable but at present we need to solve problem of long tail in jee marks.

Unknown said...

See according to me board,beside knowledge,give imp to presentation.and paper checkers mood is different tension for students.what he wants in answer is also different issue.in short our board marks are decided by our knowledge aur other person.while in case of competetive exams its all about our knowledge and accuracy.these all iit and nit wants.
Also not to neglect the board exams.they helps to be creative but considering it for comparing candidates is not right.

Muhammed said...

@sunny
Board exams and JEEs are all important.The problem here is with the normalisation formula ; ; clearly pointed by many above.The condition where we have stronger and weaker boards is the worst case scenario. The effort here is to do away with a formula which doesn't connect a student with his boardmarks but connects more with his boardmates performance in JEE proving to be disadvantageous for some deserving ones and advantageous for some undeserving ones.
If crammers are the ones cracking JEE it should have been scrapped off in the first place.The problem is some students feel thrown away by a formula which was announced so late.
We would have justified the normalisation procedure if we had a common board in our country and the students were aware of it prior to the examinations

Sunny said...

Friends I feel the problem is not with the procedure but our ingrained belief that JEE exam is the true measure of one's potential which anybody neutral will agree is a flawed system in the present scenario -because the good testing mechanism has been effectively ambushed by coaching institutes. Each person is entitled to his views and I feel the current system is just about the best option in the current scenario ( No I am not an effected party ). Dear Ashish the meaning of derivation in my previous comment is not what you have understood. What I meant was application of formula in numericals and not classical derivations. Gud Luck to All !

Not yet! said...

@Sunny. Its not about the boards being the right or the JEE being the right form to judge the students.

The problem is with the unfair comparison of %iles from one exam to another. They are separate exams and well thers is no issue giving them separate respects, but don't equate them in a faulty method. Thats the real argument here.

Also guys, the petition is gaining support. Have over a 100 signers now. Good to see the word spreading.

http://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/cbse-chairman-vineet-joshi-ias-stop-highly-erroneous-normalization-for-cbse-jee-main-ranking-2013

Unknown said...

Here the dabate is on last minute decessions, whether the board weightage benefits or not tot he coaching institutes is diffrent matter, whatever change proposed it should be minimum 2 years in advance so that all the students will be well aware of the system and study accordingly but here the normalisation formula has been decided after completion of Board exams and even after Jee main exam, it is too late and it is nothing but leaving the ranks to fate of the students it is very upsurd. kindly defer the board weightage decession for this year atleast and take a wise decession for next academic year and save the talent of the nation.

Muhammed said...

Another factor which has a hidden significance in this normalisation formula is the bulk of the students.For instance let's take the two major boards in our country ISC(around 2 lakhs) &CBSE(around 10 lakhs).In the board with more no. of students the variation of marks with percentile rank is steeper than in board with least no. of students.For example in CBSE for (approx.) top 5 percentile the difference of marks in % is 9.1 whereas for ISC it is 7.4.
Clearly the students of least popular boards are having a disadvantage no matter what difference they have in the difficulty level of their syllabus.

We can't simply ignore all these and argue that the proposed normalisation procedure is the right solution for the crisis our country's educational system is facing today.
The mistakes have to be rectified.

Neeraj said...

@sunny
Dear sir if you are not an affected party, then I don't consider you competent enough to comment on the issue, for the simple reason you can't understand the pain of discrimination.

Unknown said...

Here the debate is on the time of the decession of the normalisation formula declared, in fact no student knows about the formula when they are preparing for Board exams then how can they simply leave the ranks to their fate. wahtever change should be informed well in advance of atleast 2 years. one thing is sure that whether u give weightage to board marks or not the coaching centers will take advantage either way, hence we should not think of their influence on the students. I request all experts of education system to interfere and take up the issue with CBSE to convince them to differ the Board marks weightage for the current year and take a strong formula which is acceptable to all public after conducting public hearings in all the cities.

Sunny said...

Dear Neeraj ,
Only those uneffected can be competent as they will be neutral and unbiased and not emotionally charged. However I fully sympathise with those effected and very well understand their pains but here we are looking at the larger picture as the author of this blog would like it to be .

Unknown said...

@Sunny-The intellectual way of assuming the unaffected ones being competent / neutral does not justify implementing a wrong mapping formula. It is a hasty way of working out for sake of finding a solution by JIG. There are several shortfalls to be plugged before normalizing the board scores. Instead doing the right job the formula inventors are dancing to the BABU’s tunes with their egos. No one has the right to deter the future of meritorious aspirants.

Who can justify the disparity between the students at the below case (the NEUTRAL guy should tell and the sympathies for Student B does not help any way).

Student A got 300/360 in mains and 525/530 (99%, 99.99 percentile)
Student B got 300/360 in mains and 506/530 (95.5%, 93.2 percentile)
After normalization:
Student A: 0.6*300 + 0.4*345 = 318 (the rank range 600)
Student B: 0.6*300 + 0.4*113 = 225 (the rank range 6000)
Student B is at a loss of 93 marks (93/360 = 26%) for having got a less percentage of 3.5% (99-95.5 i.e 19 marks)in boards (A.P).

As a NEUTRAL Person, should advocate and preach for -1. Ordinance to eliminate the Coaching centers from the system. 2. Implement same board marks weightage in IIT admissions (Why IIT’s should be spared and brought to the reach of non-crammers of your view) 3. Prior to the formula implementation stop the malpractices happening at the boards level. 4. The neutral ones should take the issue to floor of court to evolve the fairness of the JIG formula. The list has many……

Neeraj said...

Actually I am not able to make out what Sunny is trying to say. If you say JEE marks are obtained by students only after mugging up then why are you supporting a formula which is again taking Marks from JEE even for 40% board component. It is really absurd. 50% of candidates (Out of 14 Lakh appearing) get less than 10 % marks and I think around 5 Lakh candidates get the total in negative.

Muhammed said...

Now we are having apparently a strong board CBSE.If this system of consifering a students percentile ranking was announced two years prior to implementation many if not all students would have preferredCBSE over their current syllabus.

venugopal rao said...

@All
The entire discussion points out one thing, i.e; the JEE MAINS 2013 Normalisaion Formula has not been properly thought out and has been done in haste as a quick fix solution. It has only come out in May this year after the Board examinations, so students had no idea how the 40% board marks are going to be and their implications. This formula doesn't make sense and is extremely unfair as you can see in the discussion. When the executive has failed miserably we have to look towards the judiciary, the other pillar of the democracy.

Hailing from Hyderabd, I request all the concerned parents/students of Andhra Pradesh should come together to take legal action by filing a petition in the High Court of A.P. as the time is running out. I also request the concerned parents/organizations of other States to fallow the same to stop this highly erroneous normalization for JEE Main Ranking – 2013. Our ultimate aim should be removal of Board marks in JEE MAIN 2013 and ranking should be based on JEE MAIN scores only.
Looking forward to your views,
Regards,
C.V. Rao (venugraoc@gmail.com)

santanudey said...

C.V.Rao garu,
I am with you.I am from Vizag...kindly guide us about the future course of action.You can directly mail me at santanuday@gmail.com

Unknown said...

@venugoal rao
Sir i am not supporting this procedure but as we already know,60-40 pattern was already annouced last months of previous year(i guess but not this year i am sure).yes how marks will normalise,procedure comes in may.bur all 2013 board passed out students were aware that boards weightage is 40 per.so they have oppturnity to get more and more percentage.also other factors like i described above were already in their favour.but what about we 12 class student.we were not aware of this kind of system.Sir its true at last momen we cant do anything instead of protesting and taking leagal actions in court.CBSE is trying to realease results in hurry and finish councelling in july too so that no one get oppturnity to say against them.whatever they want.
Sir i am trying to give a balanced solution.like procedure this years councelling should also be completed in different way.CBSE can divide the seats of nits further into 2012 passed and 2013 passed equally.i mean in each and every category.private institutes can takes their own decision of admissions and for state govt college its depend on them.also cbse can show the rankings in 2012 students and 2013 student same as state ranks.I am not sure but i think this formula is the only workable solution.
Please all respected sirs and dear fellows give your view on this.

Unknown said...

@venugoal rao
Sir i am not supporting this procedure but as we already know,60-40 pattern was already annouced last months of previous year(i guess but not this year i am sure).yes how marks will normalise,procedure comes in may.bur all 2013 board passed out students were aware that boards weightage is 40 per.so they have oppturnity to get more and more percentage.also other factors like i described above were already in their favour.but what about we 2012 12 class student.we were not aware of this kind of system.Sir its true at last moment we cant do anything instead of protesting and taking leagal actions in court.CBSE is trying to realease results in hurry and finish councelling in july too so that no one get oppturnity to say against them.whatever they want.
Sir i am trying to give a balanced solution.like procedure this years councelling should also be completed in different way.CBSE can divide the seats of nits further into 2012 passed and 2013 passed equally.i mean in each and every category.private institutes can takes their own decision of admissions and for state govt college its depend on them.also cbse can show the rankings in 2012 students and 2013 student same as state ranks.I am not sure but i think this formula is the only workable solution.
Please all respected sirs and dear fellows give your view on this.

Unknown said...

Sir,
In my view there is nothing wrong in the normalization formula given by the Board. The proposal to take Board marks is made mainly because some of the students are preparing only for competitive exams like jee main by joining tutorial colleges/dummy schools etc and totally neglecting their Board exams. This is putting those students who sincerely devote their time to attend their schools, do practical, projects and prepare for Board exams at a disadvantage in the competitive exams like Jee Main as these students are unable to devote as much time to the entrance exams as is given by students studying in dummy schools or tutorial colleges (which yearlong give coaching for entrances and in the end give some notes/material to students to mug up for Boards).
So there is no level playing field among the students. Therefore consideration of the Board marks for calculating the rank of entrance exam is a necessity. As regards the normalisation formula, I find that many are arguing that for just 3% or 2% difference in Board marks there is a difference of about 90 marks are so in Jee main. Friends that is what a competitive exam is all about. Some times for a difference in single mark there will be a gap of thousands of ranks. If you examine the ranking pattern from 130 marks to 90 marks scored in jee main you can notice that for every one mark student will drop below more than 100 ranks. But if you consider marks of 325 to 300 scored in Jee main for a loss of 5 marks one may fall below just one rank. Likewise when you consider Board marks weightage for a competitive exam like jee main they have to be considered in such a manner that they determine the students rank among those in the competition. Here also for drop in 1% there will be a fall of thousands of ranks( which you may be mentioning in terms of marks.) If you want to be top in ranking you have to necessarily score higher percentile in Boards like 99 as you score 300 or 250 plus in Jee main and not 95 or 94 percentile. Had Jee main been a high scoring exam you will then find that even in Jee main for just 1% difference in score there will be a difference of thousands of ranks. In fact, this is the best method to counter coaching institutes who wanted to nullify the effect of normalization by trying to score more marks in Jee main so that 60% weightage in jee main can neutralize 40% Boards’ weightage.

Unknown said...

No, this could also be not the solution because 2012 board students had also a chance this year by improvement test.i am sorry.but i really think that only change in conselling can compensate this.

Unknown said...

@manoj kumar
yes u are correct.This is the best step so as to encounter the empowerment of that useless coachings and many of that coaching students neither come in aieee nor in boards so they are at loss in any case.This will enhance a life of a student and i m very agree to manoj that friends this is competition and according to this method only a bunch of students will be benefitted who are above 99.6 percentile in their respective boards!!!!!

pc said...

The fact that Board Examinations and entrance examinations serve entirely different purposes, should be considered before making such trivial generalizations. As pointed out before in this forum, the entrance exam scores are a “long tailed” distribution,and the questions are carefully chosen so that the upper end is distinctive and clear enough, by choosing the right mix of questions of appropriate difficulty levels to enhance this difference among the topmost students. There is a large bunching at lower levels, because the questions are not designed to magnify the differences there, as those scores are trivial as far as the purpose of the examination is concerned. Whereas, the board exams are designed to give a near normal distribution. In fact, boards themselves emphasize grading over absolute marks, as grades are more indicative of a student’s performance in comparison to his/her peers over absolute marks, due to various inconsistencies and non-uniformity inherent to the conduct of such examinations and valuations. Remember the reasons for switchover to a uniform entrance examinations instead of board marks.
When the steep downward slope of the board marks distribution is artificially scaled to the long tail, or the hazy bunch in the entrance marks distribution, there is an unwarranted, undue and erroneous magnification of the minute differences in board marks, which are other otherwise clumped as an A1 or A+ or something by the board itself. It is not accurate to think that a difference of 3% in board marks is a very significant indicator of the “sincerity of the students in doing assignments, projects and practicals” and justifying a difference of 80 marks in the total score with that. Don’t you think that at least in some cases, it could be due to something less important like, say, less legible handwriting? If that possibility exists, would it be fair to map it to the score of a person who is much lower in the entrance spectrum?

gautam barua said...

The normalisation should have been as per the "original" proposal : 0.6* (JEE(Main) marks/360) + 0.4* (Board percentile). With this formula, the JEE(Main) marks will be the deciding factor as to whether a student gets into an NIT or not. BUT, at the same time, among those that do get in, the Board marks will play a role in deciding which NIT and which branch a student gets. It will not decide, but will play a role, especially for those whose JEE(Mains) scores are bunched somewhere in the "middle" of the qualified candidates. Isn't this formula fairer? Then why was it thrown out?
Gautam Barua

Unknown said...

i have got 180 in jee mains according to which my rank would have been around 20000...but i hv only 81% in cbse board,so according to new procedure i will be getting 40000 rank....hence it will be big loss for me and i will not get any nit with this rank,this complicated procedure will spoil my carrer..

Unknown said...

Hi,
The mess as known to us all has been created by our learned and self proclaimed intelligent politician(s).
Normalization raises a spectre of undue advantage to board performers negating the good performance in JEE main by a not so good board performer.
Well board normalization is 20+20 component as we know.
a)First 20% normalization:
Board percentile performance in class XII should be linked to percentile scores of that board only in JEE main and equivalent scores be given.
b) Second 20% normalization:
Here performance among respective board students in JEE main is being taken. Hence the score should be taken equivalent to overall JEE main percentile and not just respective board performance percentile scores in JEE main.
This will off set undue advantage to board performer of 99.9 percentile to a relatively moderate score but not highly inflated score.
Also good score holder in JEE but not so good score in boards will not be much affected.
Thanks for reading patiently

santanudey said...

@ Prof. Gautam Barua Sir,
Ofcourse that would have been much fairer.Kindly take up the the matter with CBSE chairman Mr. Vineet Joshi or other appropriate authorities.

Yogendra said...

The main problem with the anomaly in this case is that 90% and 95% which in the grade system are same (grade A => 90 -100) have a huge difference. Also weightage of 60% in one exam has no weightage at all, the example of a student A getting 345 in mains and 90% in boards and another student getting 200 in mains and 97% shows that such an anomaly cannot be ignored, anomalies will be there but such an anomaly?
When all schools exams grade 97 and 90 as equal ie Grade A.
my request to Prof Dheeraj S, as he is a member is ,Sir please don't let this happen, one year in the life of a nation which is just developing is a very long one.
(my suggestion Normalise all marks to 100, i.e. maximum marks in board if 90 will be taken as 100 and other marks calculated accordingly, take this percentage to calculate 40% marks from JEE Main maximum marks, if a student gets 90% then {(0.9x354)x0.4} will be the board component)
As is said about our father of the Nation, the greatness of the man was in his simplicity.
(As regards boards and their standing the question will always remain and can never be answered, my suggestion to the government do away with all the boards have one board pan India, just a suggestion)

Saanvi said...

Marks of best 3 papers or PCM should be calculated for percentile calculation. Moreover, it shd be .4* percentile in the board only as published initially.

Saanvi said...

Variation in jee marks on some points is very sharp like 93% to 96% of boards marks, This type of things can be avoided by
1. Considering only marks of 3 best papers.
2. Using average of all jee marks above the candidate percentile. It will eliminate sharp gaps between jee main marks due to little percentile difference .

gautam barua said...

Santanudey: Alas! I have been kept out of EVERY committee of JEE (main) and JEE (Advanced). I have studied the problem in depth and I could have made significant contributions in evolving sound procedures, once the horrible compromise was reached in July 2012. But you see, in our country, people are quick to brand you. No one believes that you could actually be neutral and work for the benefit of others. So I got branded as the "former minister's man" ( including, I suspect, by many readers of this blog), and I was "successfully" excluded from the decision making process. I know that many in these committees still do not understand what is percentile ranking and what the "original" proposal was. It is too late for me to do anything to retrieve matters now. In the process, the whole scheme of including Board marks will get discredited and there will be a clamour to get back to the "old ways". Maybe there is a method to all this after all! We will not remember the debate of 2012. We will bemoan the terrible injustices and then blame this on including Board marks! No one has argued about the benefits of the original formula. Santanudey, you are the first to have acknowledged that it is better than the current formula. So I have responded.
If you are not able to understand what I am talking about, please dont respond, as I cannot be more explicit and you need to read all the posts of 2012..
Gautam Barua

Unknown said...

Hi, from what I see here, majority of the people are against(or not much in favour) of including board exams marks as a criterion for selection through the JEE.
Well when we personally look at it, we feel that dual check on performance is a confusing and an irrelevant complicity added to the procedure. But as we see in the article above, there is a 'strong' social demarcation between the boards(better or weaker), which is actually pulling back the education system of the nation as a whole. We can see that there are different groups(based on boards; this classification can be extended further) of students appearing for these exams. Now if we leave out the brilliant students( who fair good no matter what board they belong to) and move forward to above average intelligent students and average students, those studying in better boards have much more exposure to the aspects of education and science/technology than those studying in the weaker boards, thus putting those students in 'weaker boards' behind the students in 'stronger boards'. We may argue a 100 reasons of how a board is stronger than the other but the point remains is that a divide has been created amongst the population, which needs to be filled so that a student who has passed 12th or JEE should be equivalent irrespective of the board they belong to, to fill this gap some provisions will have to be made to the 'weaker' so that they may rise up to the level of the stronger.
Many will say that these provisions are at the expense of the future of the good students, but we have seen that many students from NIT's have performed much better than those in IIT's. So if we look at a nation as a whole this inclusion of boards marks is much important now tan ever before, so that this divide amongst the youth(largest in no. in the world) is removed and education system is balanced.

Unknown said...

@mr.barua and others, every body in this country was understanding 60% and 40% formula same as you have mentioned in your comment.but now cbse has come up with this noval formula to give extra ordnary advantage to board marks.In other words they are trying to go back from their earlier formula.I am going to file a writ in this regard in punjab and haryana High court but apprihending one genuine question from the court i.e initial published notification by cbse in which this 60% and 40% formula was shown/described.can anybody give me the clue where I could get that earlier annuncement of 60% 40% by cbse

Unknown said...

Not only on this subject, but in general in our nation there is a great resistance to change, whether political,academic,social or any other matter.If the learned people who are mercilessly lampooning the studious kids who did well in Board exams, can recall, nobody in our country was happy with the government role. Everybody used to say that system has become corrupt, this, etc., Which ofcourse, no one can deny. But when PVNR proposed Privatization as a possible remedy, there was a resistance to that as well. There were plenty of court cases and finally every thing was watered down. As long as no "CHANGE" is proposed or effected,nobody is happy with the current system. Once the change is proposed, everybody will be up in arms against the change.

I am quite amused to see some comments on this blog.Everybody seems to have decided that JEE (Mains) is a lofty examination and the scores there truly represent the merit. It is also distressing to see that learned people who wrote comments on this blog not caring a damn about other performances of the students. I have no doubt in my mind under the circumstances,JIG has a done a wonderful job. No system can be 100% perfect. A few isolated instances can't be generalized and scaled up.

Neeraj said...

Mr Kapoor,
The brochure in the jee main website clearly states that board marks shall be normalised. The formula now proposed is not normalising the board marks rather it is using board percentile to pickup jee marks. This tantamounts to changing the rules of the game halfway.

Srikanth63 said...

Sir,

So much of emotions and it is quite amusing to see so much hue and cry discussing extreme cases.

Are the reduced overall marks due to Board exams going to stop top 8000 rankers (based only on exams in OP) from getting a decent course? Perhaps not. What is so great about JEE Main, anyway and if there are only 25K seats, what's wrong in expecting the students to be in the top 2 percentile of both his/her Board exam and JEE Main?

Actually, a bigger menace with respect to NITs is Home State Quota of 50% seats. I am not sure, aberration this quota creates in every class room year after year would be created by this new system. No one raises any objection. Hardly surprising!

So much of whining everywhere (not just this blog) and yet no concrete real life examples have surfaced even after Jee Main and JEE Advanced marks are officially out. Let me provide one.

My son scored 163/360 in JEE Main and 131/360 in JEE Advanced. CBSE Marks is 470/500 (nearly 99 percentile) He won't get a seat in IIT (He made it to merit list) His JEE Main rank in the previous method would have been around 23K. He would not have got any seat being in General Category. With is new method, he would be around 14-15K. Still, there would not have been any seat, but for state quota, if at all, that is.

My personal belief is that School Marks should be weighted and State Quota should be scrapped.

Disclaimer - IISER is where my son would be heading if he gets a seat (which I believe, he would)and he is not likely to be stealing someone's seat in NIT.

Shishir said...

I am amazed at incoherence of this Government’s Education policy. To reduce stress and to end Rat Race of numbers they did away providing marks in 10th clubbing everyone in 90-100% bracket in A1 grades.This was supposed to be followed in 12th also. But now they have done just opposite.

It is also amazing that they thought this procedure of 12th marks weightage only to punish Engineering aspirants. Why not in NEET-UG test for Medical. Every Medical aspirant also has to attend Coaching and in fact more than 50% selections are from one single institute of Kota. So why they were spared.

And then originally they propose only 60% weight for Jmains and 40% for 12th marks. Anybody wud interpret that if a student X scores 60 marks more than Y in Jmains but 45 marks less in 12th , X should get higher Rank. But the preposterous Normalisation makes 40% of 45 more than 60% of 60 !!!

For example for this Year 2013 CBSE top scorer is 99%(495 marks). Being Topper he is 100th percentile in Board and thus will get JEE Mains Topper marks of 345.

Student scoring 90%(450 marks) in CBSE Board would be assigned 95th percentile as about 5% students have scored more than 90% in CBSE 12 this year.At this 95th percentile he will get about 120 marks as out of 1400000 applied in Jmains , 95th percentile wud be 70000 rank and we know that 75500 rank was at 113 marks.

What above means is that a difference in Board marks of only 45 marks (between 99% and 90%) is being transplanted in JMains as 225 marks (345-120) before application of 0.4 factor.
Effectively what should have been a difference of 18 marks (0.4*45) is now diff of 89 marks (0.4*225).

One more thing is that actually Difference should have been further scaled down to 18*360/500= 13 marks as the Board numbers are out of total 500 whereas Jmains was of 360 marks. So now actual amplification is from 13 to 89 marks.

This is weightage of not 40% but 280%


Yogendra said...

“All Boards are Equal”
I agree with Prof Barua ,that there is a method in this madness and some vested interests are trying to prove that the old system was better. We know it isn’t, the entrance exam system is a loaded dice in favour of big cities with better coaching Faculty
Now to the main point , I request Professors Barua and Sanghi to kindly take up this study urgently and publish the out-come,
In your respective institutes please kindly find out the intermediated board of the top ten students in your branch for all semesters a basic database is now created to see the performance of people from different boards, this data base can then be extended to include all branches in your respective institutes, Then we can go and collect the data for all IITs (maximum Twenty telephone calls and twenty emails is all that is needed for you to get the data) A little more effort and Data for top 5 NIT can also be included. There is still enough time to prove that most of the major boards in the country are equal. Data from NCERT should surprise a few.
So the assumption that the boards are diverse is not true, what we want is good Institutes getting the best students , All boards teach the same type of curriculum, The question papers if compared will show that Boards use each others questions in different years,
Before jumping the Gun and assume I am correct and all boards are equal lets wait for the outcome of this study.

Dheeraj Sanghi said...

I hope everyone has had a chance to express their views. I will close comments after 200. This is 183rd comment. So there is still time to get your views in. Please note that I have not allowed certain types of comments. One, those written in SMS type language, or really poor language. Two, those which talk about one's own marks, and ask what rank could he/she expect, or something which is completely irrelevant to the post. Three, which uses a particularly harsh language. I have allowed some outpouring of emotions as you can see on the comments, but a few extreme cases have been denied.

aaa said...

@dheeraj sir,
thanks a lot. well, after all these comments and analysis, what one would like to know is, is anything happening on this front from CBSE side and whether the outpouring of emotions (in most of cases supported by reasoning for not adopting the normalisation formula) has had any effect at all..?

Some of commentators above highlighting advantage of the present announced formulae seem to have missed the wood for the trees. The issue here is the normalisation formulae and NOT the weightage to the board marks. The weightage had been fixed as 40%(duly normalised) by learned people and committees. It was opposed that boards should not have weightage at all due to many assumptions, presumptions etc.., but that is the thing of the past. A decision was taken and announced in july/august 2012 that boards will have weightage duly normalised. Why is it so hard to comprehend that the present normalisation formulae is not doing that. There has to be a re-visit of the whole exercise and as the time is fast running out (it may be to the advantage of our dear cbse, JIG and statisticians though), it has to be done fast and a way out has to be found out to actually reward the students in the same manner as they have performed in their respective boards and JEE (Main). The mixing of the two (some called it apples and oranges) does not gel by any logic. Whatever way out is found out, it must be ensured that the weightage as pronounced earlies by cbse is retained.

thank you very much sir for the opportunity to express our views..

Unknown said...

I thank Prof Sanghi for the wonderful initiative of seeking opinions from the public. I am of the firm view that wonderful job has been done by JIG in coming out a well thoughtout Normalization procedure under the circumstances. Some of the bloggers have raised a bogey by articulating extreme cases and genaralizing them.They are only trying stall the entire process quoting these examples. As @sreekanth63 has said very rightly, nobody has talked about injustices like state quotas etc., If we need to find solution to the issue that should be by thinking holistically and not by pointing out cases like someone scoring 345 in JEE(Mains) and 85% in Boards. Everyone agrees these cases are rare.

Someone may do a statistical analysis post the anouncement of ranks on this. It is beyond imagination that how someone scoring so high in JEE(Mains) score so little in Boards. If that can happen, the reverse is also equally true.For reasons like some student falling sick on the exam date or affordability of the coaching institutes, hailing from inhospitable regions of the country etc,, can be the reasons. Mere statistical possibilities should not hamper from going ahead with this formula. Instead concentration can be on subjects like making board exams tougher,logical and objective.

Not yet! said...

I agree. From here on can people only post about any significant development they are doing/ in the know of in terms of having this formula quashed for this session.

From my side:
1. Lots of people signed the petition and have written individual mailers to the CBSE Chairman.

2. Affected students are trying to get this published in Print Media like HT/TOI and taken up in News Channels. That effort is on. If anyone can contribute it get a wider audience by way of media kindly pitch in.

I'm attaching the petition anyways, which has over 450 people now.

http://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/cbse-chairman-vineet-joshi-ias-stop-highly-erroneous-normalization-for-cbse-jee-main-ranking-2013

menghanivijay said...

@ rajan kapoor
Sir we would also like to join this writ petition.how we can contact you.

Yogendra said...

SRINIVAS TUMULURI JI
I don't think your understand the maths at all, a student at 95th percentile gets about 113 to 120 marks after normalisation and a student at 99th percentile gets 345-350 marks ,according to CBSE 90% equates to 95th percentile, so the rank errors are going to be enormous,
a student who gets 200/360 in mains and 98% in boards out ranks a student who gets 345/360 in mains and 90% boards.
do you mean to say that 90% of a national board is bad? Now please do the math for all possible cases in between and beyond, this is a blog we cannot be expected to give all the examples possible, but professor Sanghi a computer scientist can write a small program and do the math.
The committee have done a very bad job and unnecessarily complicated the matter by taking arbitrary assumptions.
the JEE main percentile curve is a very steep curve in the first five percentile group, the board exam curves are bell shaped hence the ranks allotted are going to be 95%errors.
and the difference in percentage that is 97% and 90% will mostly be in the English language and the fourth subject.
I don't know what your catch is but to say that this committee has done a good job is apple polishing.

venks said...

Dear Sir, I am sure that the normalization procedure must have been arrived at by lot of deliberations and virtual calculations. However, I believe the important factors which may not have been looked at properly are one the examination and valuation method - JEE have adopted computerized valuation, ensuring ZERO error, the CBSE's method of 12th class valuation is manual method, which results in larger extent of human errors which in turn will result in incompetent gets higher marks (I know few live cases of students who struggles to speak or even write proper sentences getting marks above 80% in English). Further, the labor put in by students in JEE is insurmoutable, whereas for the 12th class, to a larger extent memorizing could help you reach 60 to 70% and rest will be contributed through valuations. Hence it is requested that a revisit be done on the normalization procedure and let the deserving students get their dues,even if they score a little less in the 12th, whereas scored well in the JEE Mains.

Saanvi said...

Dear Srinivas
There is lot of real time examples of sharp difference in board exam and Jee main marks. Moreover subject other than PCM like Physical Education which generally do not have any marking scheme from boards is being marked by examiner differently. I have a real example where copies of continues 36 students having less than 75 marks while that have high marks in other subjects, rest of students having marks between 85-98 in the same school. It is happening in the other school also. So giving undue weightage to board marks is unjustified.
Moreover, Present rules for normalization is giving undue advantage to boards marks. 1% difference at top level in boards marks is giving huge difference of marks in total jee main marks.
I thinks it should be either .4*percentile or
it should be calculated Using average of all jee marks above the candidate percentile. It will eliminate sharp gaps between jee main marks due to little percentile difference


santanudey said...

@ Prof Barua

It is not the question of who is right or who is wrong...rather the question should be what is right or what is wrong.If you feel the present system of board marks normalization is improper then try to do something.

Unknown said...

Dear sir,
1. First of all this novel normalization formula for 40% weight age board marks announced on 13th may 2013 i.e. after completion of both JEE main exam 2013 (held on 7th April 2013) and class XII Board exam which is completely injustice to the students aspiring for NIT.
2. In this novel formula one student board percentile shall be normalized to same percentile JEE main percentile which is the score of some other student. The normalization should be with my own score/marks/percentile but my board weight age 40% should not be normalized with someone else mark/score/percentile in JEE main.
3. The two exam i.e. JEE main and board exams are entirely different. And hence board percentile should not be normalized with JEE main percentile.
4. Take one example for academic interest: Rank 1 i.e.100%ile in last Year AIEEE was 343 marks. Rank 2800 at 270 marks., with 99.98%. This means that at the top there is a difference of 73 marks in JEE Mains for a meager %ile diff of only 0.2. For similar %ile diff in Board the diff in marks would hardly be 4-5 marks. So how badly a student X at 99.98 %ile would be hit because of this unmatched transplantation vis-à-vis student Y at 100%ile in Board. This huge amplification occurs for top 3%ile which matters for NITs.

5.Compare first Top 1000 rank students on the basis of JEE main 2013 score and after applying normalization of 40% board wightage. Put them side by side and now compare their rank after normalization with the rank on the basis of JEE main 2013 score and see the unexpected change in the rank with only 40% board weightage. You will appreciate that instead of 40% weightage of board , actually it is more than 300% weightage in favour of board.
6. : Take another example for academic interest: If a student scores 95%, just 2% more than his friend who gets 93% in the Board it would mean he has scored 10 extra marks (CBSE: 5 subjects each for maximum marks 100). But this two per cent marks will be resulting into a big difference in JEE marks mapping, which won't be uniformly distributed.

For instance, a student X scored 345/360 in JEE (mains) and 90% in CBSE class XII. Let's make a fair assumption that these marks of 90% will probably correspond to about 93 percentile in the boards. Now, If there are 14 lakh student giving JEE (Main), this student will be allotted marks equivalent to 93 percentile of the JEE (Main) ranks. The official cut-off declared for JEE (Advanced) is 113 with a rank of 75,000 for general category. Probably this year 93 percentile in JEE (Main) would correspond to about 98,000 rank (7% of 14 lakh applicants) and corresponding marks would be well below 113 only, which is below the cutoff list. So X may get ultimate marks of =0.6x345+0.2x105+ 0.2x 105=207+21+21=249

Now if a student Y scored 200/360 in JEE (Main) and 97.5% in boards then probably he is at 99.98 percentile and corresponding to this he may get 330 marks in JEE (Main). Then ultimately Y may get final marks of =0.6x200+0.2x330+0.2*320=120+66+64= 250. What a pity! JEE (mains) exam is much much tougher than CBSE XII Board, still in spite of scoring 145 marks more in JEE mains but because of lower % in CBSE/Board may create such havoc i.e. weightage of Board exam is 200% instead of 40%.
My suggestion is as mentioned below; 40% weightage of board should be 0.4x board normalized percentile x3.6. a constant 3.6 is to be considered to bring full marks 360 at per with full marks of JEE. An example for academic interest is as mentioned below: a student got 94 percentile in board and 250 marks in JEE MAIN. After applying normalization formula OF 60-40%( JEE main- Boart), the normalized score of the student will be 0.6x250+ 0.4x99x3.6= 150+142.56=292.56.


Sir, thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to express my feelings and concern. sir. I hope you will take up this with appropriate authority before it implementation. regards, roy.

Yogendra said...

I would also like to request the committee to kindly look into the mains marks of all students getting more than 95% in the board exams of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh board
and then decide on the volume of errors. I have read else where in different sites about students from these boards asking what their rank will be, they mostly have low mains mark and around 97-98 %.

Shishir said...

@Dheeraj Sanghi

I request you to not close comments on this blog. This debate is going to be even hotter after ranks of JEE Mains are out on 7th July.Some of the persons continue to believe that anomaly occurs for isolated examples cited whereas any discerning person can see the curves and say that it is applicable on the whole top percentile range.
Actually for the benefit of new debaters this blog should continue to be posted on the opening page instead of hiding it in "older Posts".

Yogendra said...

The Final Nail,
Consider a case where we have 1000 students getting 200 to 250 marks in mains, this is a very possible case, say out of these 1000 students 300 fall in the 97-99 percentile and the rest fall in the 90 to 96 percentile group absolutely possible. lets call this Group 1
Now also consider a case of another 1000 students getting 120 marks in mains(could have taken 113 but the decimal points bother me) and from this group of students say 100 students get in the 97 t0 99 group (absolutely possible figure in TN and AP) lets call this Group 2
Normalised marks of group 1
250x0.6= 150 board percentile 96th probably links to 130 marks in all India and state (tough I have a feeling state marks will be less) so for sake of discussion lets say 120+130=250
250/2=125, 125x0.4=50
150+50=200 for 700 student who got 250 marks in JEE Mains.
Normalised marks of group 2
120x0.6=72 board percentile 97th equivalent to 325 marks lump sum
325x0.4=130
130+72=202 for 100 student who gets 120 marks in JEE Mains.
So 700 deserving students are out ranked by 100 not so deserving students, the reason I say this is the board marks of the group 1 people if compared with group 2 will show that in maximum number of cases the PCM marks of group one will be better, so group one students are more deserving to be in Engineering.
If the simple 60 /40 is used, such cases wont crop up, I still maintain that there is cheating in all boards, there is laxity in all boards, there is marks buying and selling in all boards, there is political pressures in all boards and there are deserving and good students in all boards, Normalise the maximum marks to 100 marks across all boards and solve the problem before some poor child who has 250/360 and 90% takes his/her own life.

santanudey said...

@ Yogendra Sharma
The intermediate education in A.P is totally controlled by a couple of so called corporate colleges.Leaking question papers in the name of suggestions,invigilator assissted copying and malpractice in all possible formats is inflating the marks of the studnts.I know hundreds of students students with 97%-98% in board but only 80-95 in JEE Main.At the same time there are many students mostly from rural and non-corporate college back ground with 85-90% in board but very good score 180-250) in JEE Main.

Unknown said...

Let all of us keep in mind that the normalization formula has been arrived at by a committee comprising of distinguished academicians who have been entrusted with the job of coming out with an acceptable formula for the current year. It would not be out of place here to mention that these members are absolutely apolitical and are of great reputation who have the interests of Indian technical education at heart. Mind you, we are not talking here whether board marks should be considered in the first place. The decision of giving weightage to the board marks is of the Executive/Government. It is not the correct forum to discuss that. That having been decided, the role of the committee is just to come out with a normalization formula nearer to perfection given the set of rules and regulations. It is unfortunate that certain mathematical geniuses(Pun intended for @Yogendra Sharma) are trying to prove the committee wrong. The basic assumption which he and some bloggers are making is that, they are all approaching the issue with a mindset that JEE(Mains) marks should be the benchmark.
For example, see the comment below of Shri Yogendra Sharma quote : “I would also like to request the committee to kindly look into the mains marks of all students getting more than 95% in the board exams of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh board and then decide on the volume of errors. I have read else where in different sites about students from these boards asking what their rank will be, they mostly have low mains mark and around 97-98 %.”. unquote .
Such comments are undesirable. Is it to state that JEE(Mains) examination is the ultimate and all should be analyzed vis-à-vis their performance in this exam? If that is the case, then it is also equally true that many people who scored well in TN or AP boards did not do well in JEE(Mains) for the same reasons as cited and should be benchmarked accordingly. If we argue that, let the Hon’ Court take this point also into cognizance and reduce the weightage for JEE(Mains)? On the contrary, students who scored excellently well in JEE(Mains) and have fared poorly in Boads are most probably products of coaching institutes and are privileged. It is really ununderstandable that why a normal student who scored well in JEE fails to score well in Boards, given that Board exams are that much more simpler. Just as @Yogendra Sharma has stated, I am also aware of many people who scored exceedingly well in Both JEE(Mains) and Boards. This is especially true in AP from where the bulk of the rankers hail from, with or without normalization. Statistics of last year prove this point beyond any doubt. This year also I know of many people who scored very well in both . Infact, the number of students who did not score well in Boards but scored well in JEE(Mians) is very little. Agreed that many boards are yet to evolve. The solution to the issue is that Board exams also should be made objective and a little tougher. This will probably reduce the evaluation errors and subjectivity. Having said that, in a country of our size and diversity, it is almost impossible to come out with a formula that is acceptable to all and unacceptable to none. To end the arguments, such a hue and cry is unwarranted. The purpose would be better served by fighting against the state quotas and to make board exams more logical. Individual grievances should not form the basis for stalling the entire process with a meandering legal wrangle putting the future of so many at risk. Many students who did well in JEE(Mains) have also done very well in Boards and most likely would get into the NITs. Let us wish them all the best for these kids. It is highly unlikely that these distinguished academicians have committed a mistake, given the complexity.

RK said...

A system which is even straing a student scoring about 94% in CBSE, and 240 in JEE mains, how can that he called fair, what are we expecting out of a student. Then in that case, why not consider only the board marks for selection into NITs. And what about so may state boards, where mass copying is rampantly prevelant and is a known fact. Knowledge levels of most of the 1st divisioners, which is considered as good, is actually pathetic. Also the rule of the games are fixed before the start of the game, which in this case was 40% weightage of board marks, which is OK. Now when the game is over, one cannot be coming out with new rules then. I have read in some remarks that how is it possible for a student to get good marks in JEE and poor JEE marks. In fact such cases are low, I want to ask why so many students getting really high in boards exams are performing pathetically in JEE mains. I also feel courts intervention could only provide respite against such a draconian formula.

Saanvi said...

Dear SRINIVAS TUMULURI
You are again and again trying to deviating from main issue of huge difference in total marks of JEE main due to 1-2% difference in boards marks at higher level 90 to 95% due to normalization process. This is the only issue which should be discussed and some solution and suggestions should be forwarded to the committee. If some one have 93% and other has 95%, Difference of their marks added to jee main for boards result should not be more 2%.
I have made suggestion that
1 It should be simply percentile*.4 which was initially given. It should not do mapping with JEE main marks'' or
2. Using average of all jee marks above the candidate percentile. It will eliminate sharp gaps between jee main marks due to little percentile difference .''
Pl. comment on my two suggustions.

Sudharshan said...

I feel that there should be a balance in this thread and there has to be some representation of those students who have done well in Board exams also. I would say that the normalization formula given this year is correct, since

- Any number makes sense only if it is brought to the baseline score against which it is measured. In this case the JEE (Mains) percentile score is the target baseline. So, any percentile number from Board makes sense only if it is brought to the JEE (Mains) baseline. Any other method will result in comparing apples and oranges.

- In such conversions due to the fact that percentiles and marks may have different gradients in different systems, the difference in score may not exactly be equal to the difference in percentiles in all the gradients.

- I see many remarks here insulting all the Boards and says that the JEE (Mains) is the only right way of measurement.These comments are a disservice to all the teachers who have been striving very hard to make sure that their students come out in the top and to all the students who have meticulously followed up with great commitment their +2 curriculam.

- To say that a percentile differences in Board examination is just a matter of chance is ridiculous. In such a case, looks the only thing that matters is students cramming up the courses from coaching centres. What about those students who may have done very well in their Boards, but may not have done well due to some reason on the day of JEE (Mains). If the performance over an year in the Board is a matter of chance, is their performance in a single day in JEE (Mains) more so not a matter of chance?

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