JEE Mains 2024 Result: Why Advanced Cutoff Highest in 5 years

The result of JEE Mains 2024 is out and every newspaper is reporting that the cutoff for eligibility of general category for JEE Advanced (for admission to IITs) has gone up to 93.2 percentile. In 2023, this cutoff was 90.7 an in 2022, this cutoff was 88.4.

Why has this happened. The simple answer is that the competition has increased. The number of students taking the JEE Mains exam has increased substantially this year and hence the percentile score has gone up.

To explain this with an example. If I want to select 10 students out of 100, I am selecting those who are above 90 percent of the students, or in other words, my cutoff is 90 percentile. But if I want to select 10 students out of 150, I am selecting those who are above 93.33 percent students, or in other words, my cutoff is 93.33.

If we look at the numbers, the total number of students who took JEE Mains (in either session) in 2023 was 11.13 lakhs, while the total number of students who took JEE Mains in 2024 was 14.15 lakhs, an increase of 3 lakh students. So clearly, if the same number of students is being selected for JEE Advanced (roughly 2.5 lakhs), the cutoff will go up. Please note that it is not dependent on the difficulty level of the question papers in different sessions. So one cannot interpret this data to imply that questions were easier or tougher this year.

But if this simple answer was the complete reason for increase in cutoff, I wouldn't be writing this blog. Enough media houses have pointed out the increased number of candidates. In fact, if the reason was only the increased number of students, the cutoff should have been around 92.7 percentile (and not 93.2).

There is another very interesting reason for increase in cutoff. And that is the impact of two sessions of JEE Mains exam.

A student can take JEE Mains once or twice (in January/April). The higher of the two scores is assigned to the student. Now, consider a scenario where 100 students take the exam in the first session, and the same 100 students take the exam in the second session. The top 10 of the first session is the same set as top 10 of the second session. And now, if I am selecting the top 10 students, I will select those who are above 90 percent students in either of the two sessions, or 90 percentile will be my cutoff. But if the two set of 10 toppers are completely disjoint, that is, there is no common person in top 10 (actually top 5), then I end up taking top 5 of first session, and top 5 of the second session, and my cutoff will be 95 percentile. So the interesting consequence of two session exam is that more than 1 percent students can be there within 1 percentile.

So, the cutoff crucially depends on not just the total number of students, but also on how many students took the exam twice and how many of them had inconsistent results in two attempts. Inconsistency here means that their performances in two sessions is significantly different. And that seems to have played a role in increasing this year's cutoff.

Last year, 5.94 lakh students appeared in both sessions out of 11.13 lakh unique students, which means that 53 percent of all unique exam takers appeared in both sessions. This year, 8.23 lakh students appeared in both sessions out of 14.15 lakh unique students, which means that 58 percent of all unique exam takers appeared in both sessions. So a lot more people have worked hard in the intervening period to see a significant increase in their performance compared to session 1, and that has increased the cutoff by another 0.5 percentile.

Please note that the exact cutoff would also be dependent on the distribution of the number of candidates of different categories, how many students from different categories get counted in general category because of their top performance, and so on. But there is no reason to think that across just one year, there would be significant differences in group performances.

What to do if you didn't meet the cutoff for JEE Advanced but still want to study in an IIT.

Most IITs have a scheme to allow students from other colleges to study as a non-degree student for a semester or two. But pretty much no college has a system of credit transfer despite NEP2020. To the best of my knowledge, the only university in India which sends a large fraction of their students to do coursework in IITs is JK Lakshipat University in Jaipur.

There is also a very liberal scholarship for those who have done well in JEE Mains. If you have 95+ percentile in JEE Mains, you study for free. If you have 90-95 percentile in JEE Mains, you get 75% fee waiver, and so on. And these scholarships can potentially last for all four years based on performance. Check out the details on the scholarship page.

 

Is there a problem if everyone wants to study CS/AI

In every media interaction and now, even social gatherings, I get asked if Indian growth story will get affected if no one studies Civil/Chemical/Mechanical/Electrical and everyone only wants to do CS, AI, and at best ECE. How will the new infrastructure be built. How will we become a hub for manufacturing. Can we be VishwaGuru with everyone studying only AI.

And I tell them to just relax. Lots of students are studying non-CS/IT engineering branches. One can check AICTE data for the same. There is no shortage of pieces of paper declaring someone to be a graduate in Civil Engineering. And it takes only 4 years to print more paper, if there is need.

The problem is that degrees are only on paper and do not reflect learning. Industry is genuinely worried that they are not finding good engineers. But that problem is also true for software industry. They too are not finding good engineers.

Who are joining non-IT engineering programs. There are, of course, rare students who for whatever reasons are interested in these programs. But these are rare. In any given college students prefer CS and related programs over other engineering programs. This is true of IITs and this is true of Tier 3 colleges. But a lot of students think about non-CS in a more competitive college versus CS in less competitive college and there are enough who choose non-CS in a more competitive college. This comparison happens not just between IIT Civil versus NIT CS. It also happens between Civil Engineering at an affiliated college versus CS at a private university. (Affiliated colleges are cheaper and a lot of students/parents believe that getting a degree from a government owned technical university is somehow more valuable and education does not matter.) This comparison is here to stay and we will always find enough students taking up non-IT engineering programs.

There are some smart students who take benefit from this lopsided preference of the society. They can get admission to a college which provides much better overall education than they would have got if all branches had equal interest from students, and they get better placement too. Don't believe me, let me explain.

Most people would look at placement data and see that average of CS batch is higher than average of Civil batch. They also notice that the highest salaries in CS are much higher than the highest salaries in Civil. And they assume that they are the ones who will get those highest salaries. But smart people will think differently. They will understand that it is very difficult to be the topper of CS batch while it is much easier in a less competitive branch. It is aided by the fact that a lot of students who join non-IT branches keep wondering if they took the right decision and whether they should have taken up CS in a less competitive college. Their peers also demotivate them. The smart people will further notice that the top few jobs to Civil engineering graduates are of higher amount than the median of CS. And hence the expected placement is better in Civil for these people. (Of course, I must quickly add that I would never recommend anyone to choose a branch based on placement data or a faulty concept like Return-on-investment. But man people still do that.)

So, overall, I don't see a problem in terms of number of people opting for non-IT branches. The problem is that a very large number of people are not getting the education they deserve in every discipline.

The related question is if it is possible for a top institution to attract better (read, more motivated) students to non-IT programs. Yes, it is possible. The simple method is to project placement data differently (unfortunately, people will look at placement data). Instead of projecting data in terms of discipline, if they project data in terms of CGPA, and point out that the placement is strongly correlated with CGPA (and to a lesser extent with a discipline), the craze for certain disciplines will go down. Also, if they don't already offer minor in CS/AI, do so. The students will have the confidence that if they don't get a job in their chosen discipline, they can go back to IT recruiters in the final year. And, finally, offer dual major. A student admitted to Civil should have the option to pick up his/her second major in CS/AI. This, again, gives confidence to the student in case things don't go right in Civil, and also produces inter-disciplinary engineers which are so important for the industry.

Progression of an engineering student in a typical college

Yesterday, one Mr. Angad Daryani, CEO of a startup, Praan Inc, tweeted about an IIT Kanpur graduate whose CV, should we say, had a few things which he hadn't done. He has since deleted the tweet (or post on X, but old timers like me still call it twitter) saying that the tweet resulted in IIT bashing which wasn't the intention. The intention was to point out lack of ethics in some people only.

I replied to that that this lack of ethics is very common in Indian academia and not limited to IITs. This also had a lot of reactions and I started thinking about why does this happen.

The life of a typical student interested in engineering changes as s/he enters class 11th (sometimes even in class 9th, and in rare cases, even earlier). They have to go through JEE coaching, a lot of hard work, typically, more than 12 hours a day, every day, for two years. No one can do this kind of hard work unless the fruits are really sweet. So they are told by everyone in the society, including parents, teachers, neighbors, and relatives, "You only have to do hard work these two years, and your life will be made."

The clear implication is that college life is cool. At least that is how most students understand this. And students fall for this. A majority of them work extremely hard with the goal of getting into a top college.

Two years later, most of them will get a shock. Only one percent of our 17-18 year olds will get into top colleges. Others will have to think of second and third options. But whatever it is, whether IITs or a local engineering college, the expectation is the same that College Life is Cool. After all, all the elders cannot be wrong.

Students who go to top colleges realize very soon that they have been lied to. Most of them will adjust to new reality, some won't and will pay a price in future. But students who go to next tier colleges have a slightly different journey.

Students join a college thinking they don't have to study. But the other thing that has happened is that they had a goal for the last 2 (or 4) years and they were working much harder than what they would have done earlier. Now, whether they achieved that goal or not is not so meaningful, but it is extremely difficult to live a goalless life after working so hard for a goal for 2 years. (In that sense, entrance exams do affect the mental health of a large number of students who do not get admission to top colleges.) In our times, we could explore the college for a couple of semesters before thinking what we want to do with our lives. But not today. They need to have another goal quickly. How do they decide the next goal.

The other change that is happening at that time is adjustment to the college life. Experts have pointed out that the transition from school to college is a very stressful period for most students across the world.

So, we have three things happening. One, the expectation that the college life will be cool. Two, the stress of a transition period. Three, anxiety to set up the next goal. Whom does the first year student go to for clarity? No, not the faculty members who have seen such students in thousands, not the professional counselors of the university, not the career services office. They go to 2nd year students since they were in the same position most recently and therefore are most likely to understand their situation.

But, the second year students have no experience. They don't know what opportunities the world will have. They don't know what is needed for grabbing those opportunities. They haven't sat for a single interview for an internship. But do they say, they don't know. Of course, not. No one ever admits to not knowing something. So a confident answer is given. Your next goal should be a job. And you need two things for the job: Good grades and good soft skills.

So far, so good. No major problem with the advice. Yes, I would tell the students to do more thinking, talk to more people over the next one year, don't drop the alternatives like higher education, entrepreneurship, etc. But still, quite ok till now.

The next advice is where everything goes wrong. They are told that good grades are easy. You can just copy everything. There is no need to learn. You can prepare for campus interviews in a month in the third year. Till then, enjoy campus life. Of course, soft skills are harder to imbibe, and hence the freshers are advised to join multiple clubs, and do a whole lot of extra-curriculars.

Notice that this advice is completely consistent with what they had heard from their parents, their teachers, and everyone else. And they follow it diligently. In JKLU, where we have strong rules against copying and we have failed student for first time copying, dropped a semester for second time copying and terminated a student for third time copying, the parents will not just seek pardon for their wards, some of them will argue how we can be so different from other colleges.

In most colleges, faculty will not check for copying and really don't care for student success. So not copying can mean that those cheating can get better grades. That demoralizes a few who are still thinking of doing projects ethically. They don't realize that their career will depend more on learning and not so much on grades. At that age, grades seem like the only goal to care for. (And the society has contributed to that obsession.)

It is only in third year that they start applying for a serious internship and this is when they get a shock of their life. They fail interview after interview. Some students are smart. They realize the mistake they made in the first two years. Now, start learning and get ahead. But a lot of students are stuck. And they will either get no jobs or at best get the 3.5 to 4 lakh job in software services where the company is only looking for students who can learn (and not for students who already know something), and then have a 3-4 months training for them.

How do we solve this problem. We do a few things. First, in all our communication during the induction program, it is repeated several times that we want students to do assignments themselves, that we provide additional support in terms of student TAs, faculty office hours, and strongly encourage all first year students to take advantage of such additional resources. We also provide them a curated list of free online resources for each course, including Coursera (which we provide free to all of them). We also tell them that copying can lead to serious consequences and give examples from the past. We also try to create situations where the first year students have occasions to meet the 3rd year and 4th year students. They can certainly get better advice from senior students compared to 2nd year students.

 

Note: This journey is based on my travel to more than 100 engineering colleges and talking to several thousand students. I have not been traveling so much for the last 5-6 years. I am assuming that contours of the problem haven't changed much.