Sports Quota in IIT Madras

Recently, IIT Madras announced admission to its flagship BTech programs for those who excel in sports. They call it Sports Excellence Admission. The student should have got at least one medal at an international or national event in a specified list of sports. The ranking would depend on the number of medals, whether gold/silver/bronze, the type of competition, etc. The student should also have done well in JEE Mains and be selected to take JEE Advanced. He should have further done well in JEE Advanced to receive a rank in whatever category the student belongs to (whether general or SC/ST/PD/OBC and so on). The student should also have passed eligibility in 12th class. IIT Madras is creating two seats in each of its BTech programs for sports excellence.

It is the first time any IIT is considering admission based on excellence in sports. For a long time, the admission was strictly based on JEE. In the 1960s, there were admissions for board toppers. And then in 1960s and 1970s, there were lateral admission in 2nd year to a few students (at least in IIT Kanpur, but only one of those actually joined, and left IITK after a semester, so no one from lateral admission ever received a degree).

I have written many articles over the years asking IITs to consider an alternate admission mechanism based on performance in Olympiads (Science and Informatics), and there is thankfully some progress in that over the last few years. I know at least IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and IIT Gandhinagar have admission processes based on Olympiads performance.

Having alternate admission mechanisms bring in diversity in the classroom which enhances the quality of education for everyone (and not just for those who came in through alternate mechanism). Also, if this move catches on and other IITs also offer similar admissions (and hopefully lower the academic bar), there will be many school students who will feel less stressed and can follow their passion.

The key issue here is what should be the academic bar for these admissions. The problem is that if you do not have any academic requirement, then obviously the sports quota student may have serious difficulty in carrying out academic work at an IIT. On the other hand, having a very high bar will mean that anyone who has spent a lot of time on the field will not be able to come through this mechanism. What is the right balance? Difficult to say.

I wonder if IIT Madras did some research into this and are there students who get medals at national level games and also get a rank in IIT JEE (Advanced), and are there many of them. They are talking about 2 seats per UG program. Hence, about 20 seats. Are there 20 such students. I doubt it. So, are they hoping that this will encourage many sports persons to go for JEE coaching.

In IIIT Delhi, we had similarly desired to attract sports persons to the institute, and we took a slightly different approach. We said that if someone worked hard to play for India (in recognized sports events), they worked less on their JEE (Mains) preparation and we will assume (based on some research) that if they had not spent that time on sports, they would have got a 2 percentile increase in their JEE score (which is a rank improvement by 20,000). Similarly, if they played at the national level (represented their state), we will add 1 percentile to their JEE score. Similarly, for Chess, we said that we will work with FIDE rating. Above a certain rating, we will add 2 percentile to your JEE score, and above a lower cutoff, we will add 1 percentile to your JEE score.

The beauty of this scheme was that we didn't need any super-numerary seats. We didn't need to worry about reservations in these seats (since there is no seat outside the reservation system), we didn't need to find a complicated way to rank sports persons from different sports. We didn't need to decide how many seats in each program. We just bumped up their JEE score and put them back in the counseling process. Simple.

It worked for us as we got a couple of students through this mechanism every year. But, we were working with JEE Mains which I believe is better aligned with school board syllabus than JEE (Advanced), and hence the requirement of performance in JEE Advanced is much harder for a sports person to meet. So even with JEE Mains, getting 20 sports persons to get decent ranks would be a challenge. But with JEE Advanced, this seems like an impossible ask.

So, on the face of it, the announcement appears to be just to collect brownie points with no real intention to admit sports persons. But I hope I am proven wrong and there will be at least 4-5 student joining IITM this year, if not 20.