High Court Directs JEE to find ways to fill vacant seats in IITs

Recently, the Honorable High Court of Andhra Pradesh has passed an order directing JEE to find ways to fill up the vacant seats in 15 IITs, IT BHU, and ISM Dhanbad. Here is a link to download a copy of the order.

Since only the judgment is on the web, it is difficult to know the exact argument of all stake holders, but what I can make out from the judgment is the following.

The petitioner is a student of ISM Dhanbad, who got admission to the Institute in 2010 after passing the Joint Entrance Examination. When the results of the first round of counseling were announced, she was allotted MSc (Chemistry) in ISM Dhanbad. She paid her fee, etc., as per the JEE procedure. If you recall, last year, there was an error in the counseling. The Counseling software had not taken into account the results of the Architecture aptitude test. When this error was detected and corrected, it turned out that the course allotment of several students had to be canceled. This student was one of them. There were 52 such students. She got lucky that at least she could get a program allotted. She was assigned MSc (Mathematics and Computing). By the only 41 students could get some course in the second round. Eleven students had no where to go (even though as we will see later, there were hundreds of seats vacant in the system).

After this the details are sketchy. She apparently wanted a better branch. ISM Dhanbad refused saying that the branch changes will be done after 2nd semester, based on performance in the 1st year. However, she noticed that the rules in ISM Dhanbad did not allow too many people to get branch change. The rules said a student is not allowed to leave a branch, if that would cause the strength of the program to become less than 50%. A very large number of students who had been offered admission to ISM Dhanbad had not joined, leaving more than 250 vacancies in the Institute. This meant that many programs would have less than 50% seats filled up. Or the number of branch changes that would be permitted would be extremely few. So, she appealed to High Court that JEE should have filled up those huge number of vacant seats in all the institutes put together, and if such a thing was done in 2010, she would have got a better program to begin with.

JEE responded to the writ petition by arguing that it is not possible to keep doing multiple rounds of admission, since the classes have to start at some time. And IITs have such a high standard of academics that doing admission even a few days into the semester would be harmful to the quality of education.

The court asked for information on the number of vacant seats after the students had joined various institutes. It turned out that the number of seats vacant were 8% of the total seats available through JEE. The court has said that based on JEE's argument, if there were a small number of seats vacant, it would have accepted the situation. But the argument cannot justify such a large number of vacant seats, particularly when JEE could have started the admission process a bit earlier, and tried to incorporate another round of admission process.

For 2010 admissions, the court has asked ISM Dhanbad to allot any of the vacant seats to the student in question before doing its branch changes. And for 2011 admissions, it has asked JEE to do whatever it deems fit to make sure that such a large number of seats are not left vacant.

This is an excellent judgment which will make JEE more student friendly. However, there is one aspect of the whole admission process which has not been clearly understood by the court. If JEE were to do a 3rd round of counseling, it would still leave 8% of the seats vacant, unless the 3rd round was done AFTER the semester started.

Let us understand why third round prior to the semester would not help. The reasons for vacant seats is NOT that students who are offered seats do not accept it. Such a number is rather small after the 2nd round. The reason for vacant seats is that students accept the admission offer by paying whatever amount is needed, and then never inform JEE that they would like to withdraw. They just don't show up on the campus on the 1st day of the semester. So you can have any number of rounds prior to the semester beginning, and you still wouldn't know how many people won't show up on the appointed day.

So what is the solution. There are, in fact, several solutions possible.

The obvious one that Central Counseling Board (which does counseling for all NITs based on AIEEE ranks) makes use of is to offer admission after the semester has started. The assumption with which CCB works is that teaching is unimportant and even if a student misses a few days, nah a few weeks, may be half the semester, it is still ok for him/her to get admission. The underlying assumption appears to be that teaching in most such places is so poor that it is perhaps better for the student to not face such teaching :-) But JEE can't make such an assumption, and it has correctly argued in the court that late admissions will result in poorer quality of education.

The second solution is to admit more students than the number of seats that you have. This is the solution that every single country in the world follows (other than India, of course). In India, we believe, we are very unique. Our problems are very unique. So nothing that works in the rest of the world will work in India. (Of course, the corollary is that what does not work in the rest of the world will also not work in India.) And, therefore, we must do opposite of what the rest of the world does, and consider our seats as sacrosanct.

But, if somehow JEE can come out of this anti-rest-of-the-world feeling, then what they may do is to look at historical data about the percentage of students who don't join a particular institute, and admit that many extra students to each institute. So if we have 500 unreserved seats (since we need to do this category wise), and 10% students did not join on an average in the last 5 years, then may be I can admit 8% more (to be on the conservative side - I don't want to exceed my target strength, not by large number, anyway). So, we shall admit 540, and if 10% did not join, I will still have 486 students as opposed to 450 in the current scenario. Yes, there is a risk that I might have 510 students. But the question is that if you have capacity to deal with 500 students properly and in the best way that you want to deal with them, would you rather have 450 students and waste a significant investment, or would you rather live with a very small probability of 510 students in some year (and hence the quality of education for that batch presumably going down).

Of course, the immediate question will be what branch to assign to these extra students. It is assumed that the students will give a choice during the counseling that they are willing to be admitted to an Institute without any assignment of a program. So someone, for example, could give a higher preference for IITB-NONE compared to ISM-Dhanbad-Mining-BTech. On the joining date at an institute, we will know how many students in each category have joined. Based on this data, we know vacancies in each program in each category. We can do an internal branch change of each student based on their preferences in JEE counseling, and by this process, the unassigned students will get some program assigned to them. It is assumed that when they opt for unassigned seat, they are actually willing to take any program in the Institute. So if they have not put in all the choices during the JEE counseling, they could be given a random seat.

The problem will come when the number of vacancies (or people not joining) is less than the number of students admitted against unassigned seats. In such a case, each institute will take its own decision on how to assign programs to these people. The easiest will be to increase the number of seats in each program by same proportion. If there are 10 programs, and there are 10 unassigned students, increase 1 seat in each program.

This has a downside. Most of the JEE selected candidates - while they may have solved hugely complex mathematical problems in JEE, they will now claim that they don't understand probability and statistics. They will make statements like this: If you have 500 seats and you are admitting 8% extra, then theoretically you could have 540 students. It means that at least in such a case, you will somehow manage 540 students. Then why not admit 540 students anyway. The only answer to this question is that if you do not understand probability and statistics, then you don't deserve to be in an IIT. We will take your name off the JEE merit list.

There is a solution number 3. This is to somehow have an incentive for the student to inform JEE in advance that he has decided not to take admission. What could be such an incentive. How about returning some of the money that you charge them. Right now, JEE asks for Rs. 40,000 to be deposited for accepting admission, and whether you decide to withdraw the next day or 2 weeks later, you don't back a single paisa. If we could have a sliding scale. If you withdraw within a day, we will give you back most of the money, if you withdraw within a week, we will deduct some more, and so on. Then there is an incentive for people to decide fast and communicate that decision to JEE.

The problem with this scheme is that the Government has mandated that anyone leaving the program till the day of beginning of the semester, has to be refunded the entire amount (except a token processing fee of Rs. 1,000). IITs currently are below the radar of the government, and don't get hauled up when they don't give any refund. But if they start giving refund, they will have to follow this policy of 100% refund. This policy of 100% refund has played havoc with admission process in India. Ever since this rule has been made in 2007, most admissions are now done after the beginning of the semester in most colleges across the country. To know more about it, you may want to read one of my old blog article on refund rules. Strangely, most students and parents believe that this refund rule is very good, not realizing how it has destroyed education in NITs, and other good institutes, and how it is actually making more money for private colleges, since most admissions are now happening after the beginning of the semester, where the refunds are not controlled by this rule anyway.

So, IITs may have to argue with MHRD to junk this rule and come with an alternate scheme with gradations for refund depending on how many days before the semester the student is withdrawing.

Of course, there is a 4th solution. IIT Directors can agree that after the 2nd round of counseling, each Institute can decide on its own whether they want to do more admissions, and do those admissions in whatever way they deem fit (increase ad hocism). Of course, JEE could go to Supreme Court and not do anything on the ground this year.

The right thing to do is to do both 2nd and 3rd solutions. Admit additional students, and have a graded refund policy. Doing these things together will clean up the admission process not just in IITs, but in all engineering colleges, since they will then be able to do the same thing.

In my opinion, this high court ruling is a godsend to IITs to improve their admission process without political interference or too much media glare. After all, they will be following the legal mandate. I hope they will do something that will have a positive impact on all engineering admissions throughout the country.

In the end, I will like to just give out the vacant seats last year in old IITs, BHU and ISM in unreserved and OBC categories (combined). IITB (2/663), IITD (5/640), IITK (8/622), IITM (10/630), IIT-GHY (20/442), IIT-KGP (54/1008), IIT-R (114/866), IT-BHU (146/785), ISM (213/760).

Are IITs World Class

Everyone has heard the honorable minister, and everyone has an opinion. I have been reading a lot of those opinions, and I thought I will add my voice to the clutter as well. Of course, I only know about IITs, and hence I will not talk about IIMs.

To me the answer is, "No, IITs are not world class, but it does not matter." The whole debate is not about what is world class, and whether IITs have achieved that standard. Whether we are in this list or that list. My belief is that such statements are often a reflection of the gap between expectations and perceived reality. And, when such statements come from people who ought to know, we should not dissect their words, but look at the causes of that gap.

May be the reality is much better but people don't understand. Well, isn't that a problem then. Shouldn't IITs work on that.

May be the expectations are too high. That, in my opinion, is a good problem to have, but may be IIT administration should do some expectation management.

But, may be the expectations are reasonable, and we still don't match them. That would be very worrisome.

Let me explain with an example. I have often written about JEE on this blog and elsewhere. One can argue that in the middle of huge scandals, IITs have largely been able to offer admissions on merit. JEE has not faced any major scandal (barring some doubts in 2006) over its 50 years of existence. And that is a HUGE achievement. And whenever I criticize JEE, people love to point out all this to me. But when I criticize JEE, it is with the knowledge of this background. I criticize because my expectation from the best institutes in India is much more than conducting a scandal free UG admission. I expect the top institutes to have a transparent admission process. I expect the top institutes to do some research into their admission process and figure out whether they are getting the students of the right type. I expect the top institutes to constantly debate alternative admission strategies. So don't point to me that IITs have the best admission process. They may very well have that. But I expect them to do better than the current best.

As long as there is a gap between what is expected and what is delivered, there will be criticism. IITs can keep ignoring this criticism and stay in their comfort zone. Or IITs can dissect the exact words of the Minister and say that if we get world class budgets, then we might improve. Or they can do some introspection and say whether they can do something within the significant resources that our country spends on them and narrow that gap of expectation and performance. Unfortunately, the last part is never done.

When someone says that IITs are not working with Indian industry, IITs can counter with the statistics of how many companies have given sponsored projects, how much funds they get in these projects and consultancy. But all that means nothing to the person who complained to begin with. Shouldn't IITs be doing much more than what they are doing. I recently wrote about the Waikato Institute of Technology at Hamilton, New Zealand, who are having amazing amount of focus with industry. I am not suggesting that IITs become as focused on industry as Wintec, but certainly there is a huge scope for improving industry interaction (and without increase of budget).

When someone says that IIT graduates are not exposed to live projects and the education is very theoretical, you can counter by telling about the latest equipment in your labs, and telling about the number of lab hours that students have to spend before getting a degree, but is that what I expect from the best institutes in my country. Why can't a civil engineering student be involved with a real civil construction project on campus, and all our campuses are having a lot of construction all the time. A student who has to spend just one hour every week with the site engineer would have a great experience and understanding of how civil engineering is actually practiced. Is it too much to expect that on an average, a CSE graduate would have written 20,000 lines of code in 4 years, and I am talking about original code, not code copied from Internet (while agreeing that Computer Science is much more than coding, just like Civil Engineering is much more than construction).

I also want to comment on the supposed selectivity of IITs. We are supposed to be world class because we are the most selective. Everyone in the country has heard the numbers, one out of 50 or something to that effect, while Harvard admits one out of 10. Are we really comparing apples with apples. Harvard tells you all the parameters that they will look at for admission. They give you statistical details of some of those parameters from last year's admission (parameters which are objective like SAT score). While in case of IITs, there is only one parameter, which is unknown at the time of application, which is the JEE rank.

Let us consider an experiment for IITs. Let them conduct JEE, announce the result, and then ask students to apply for admission, knowing fully well what the last year's closing rank was in each program. I don't think you will see even a ratio of 1:2. The large number of applicants for a small number of seats only means that people believe in randomness of the admission process. And if the process is based only on objective criteria, and there is still a large ratio of applications to seats, then it is nothing to be proud of. 4.5 lakhs JEE applicants are there because there is a general feeling amongst the students that JEE is a lottery, and on a given day, anyone with coaching can score high, and also, there are now some more institutions who have started using JEE performance for admission.

(By the way, the ratio of the number of candidates in AIEEE to the number of seats in NITs is much worse. Should we say that NITs have higher selectivity, and therefore, they are also world class.)

I think the problem with IIT system is that they are satisfied with being the best in the country. And whenever anyone points out that your parameters are not what the best in the world have achieved, there is a ready made excuse - money. Double our salaries, type of thing. IITs are not doing sufficient introspection to see if they could have met the expectation of our nation to a fuller extent within the same resources.

Trends in IIT JEE Counseling

I have the closing ranks of all the programs offered through JEE from 2003 through 2010. I thought I will spend some time studying the trends and see what patterns emerge as a result. I have done two kinds of analysis. One, comparing 2003 preferences to 2010 preferences. This gives us the longer term trends. Two, comparing 2009 preferences to 2010 preferences to capture any sudden or recent trends. This was particularly done for programs in recently started IITs.

Please note that there are far too many variables which could have affected the preferences and the closing ranks. First of all, in these 8 years, the number of seats in IITs have almost doubled. We now have reservation for OBC (Non creamy layer) candidates. We also have two rounds of counseling to fill up vacant seats after the first round. There have been several new programs started in these 8 years. Also, the number of selections from each zone influence the closing ranks each year, as people tend to prefer the IIT of their zone. All this would affect the preferences and closing ranks. But the hope is that if consider the closing ranks for programs which have continued in existence for all these 8 years, the changes in other conditions should have roughly affected them in similar ways, and therefore, this study is at least indicative of what the students and parents are thinking about.

I did briefly notice the trends from one year to the other for a few popular programs in various IITs. I noticed that such changes are minor in nature. However, the changes over the 8 years' period are very significant. This happens mainly because most candidates fill up their choices under the influence of their parents. And the parents have generally no idea about various programs (not that candidates are much better at it). So the parents insist on looking at last years' closing rank and barring a few minor changes (generally related to geographical preference), ask the candidates to fill up in that order. A few brave souls do things differently, talk to a lot more people to seek advice, and actually follow that advice. These small changes become a trend over longer duration.

For the 8 year trends, I have only considered those programs which have been in existence over these 8 years.

First the programs where the closing ranks have gone down. Architecture programs are the worst affected. BArch (Roorke) closing rank has gone down from 4365 to 9490, and BArch (Kharagpur) closing rank has gone down from 3624 to 8721. Next the Design program at Guwahaty, where the closing rank has gone from 3773 to 6582. Almost identical decline is in BPharma (IT BHU), going from 4349 to 7087. All programs that have anything to do with Bio (Bio Science, Bio chemistry, Bio technology, etc.) have seen the closing ranks becoming worse in this period. (This is surprising as a large number of academicians believe that this century belongs to Biology.)

Generally, the science programs (resulting in MSc degree) have lost popularity, but where the science departments have started offering an engineering like programs, they have done better. So the programs in Engineering Physics, and Maths and Computing, have done better than programs in Chemistry and pure Physics.

The programs that have really improved their perception and ranking are those of Civil Engineering. None of the Civil Engineering programs closed within 2000 ranks in the year 2003. Now, despite such a massive expansion of IIT system, the BTech programs in Bombay and Madras closed around 1500, while at Kanpur closed just before 2000 in the year 2010. In fact, Civil Engineering has shown the most consistent improvement of closing ranks throughout this 8 year period.

There are some interesting short-term trends about other engineering disciplines, but that is later.

In terms of locations, the preference for IIT Bombay kept increasing throughout this period. Popularity of IIT Delhi has also improved quite a bit in this period. While IIT Madras has shown some improvement, IIT Kanpur and IIT Kharagpur have not been the favorites of today's generation. In general, increasing number of students are preferring bigger cities over smaller ones. (This is not to say that the meteoric rise of IIT Bombay in this period is only due to its geographic location. Far from it. There are some solid improvements in their programs, faculty, and infrastructure, last decade.)

A decade ago, when IIT Kanpur started its decline and IIT Bombay started its rise, Metro IITs offered a very regional experience, with most students from nearby areas, and non-Metro IITs offer a more cosmopolitan experience, with students coming from all over the country. And I used to recommend that people should prefer non-Metro IITs for a more diverse experience. But that has changed now. Metro IITs are offering an equally (or even better) cosmopolitan experience, with people from all over the country preferring them over non-Metro IITs.

Comparison of 2009 with 2010

If we just compare the closing ranks of 2009 and 2010, one thing that comes out strongly is the improved closing ranks for lots of programs of IT BHU. I would attribute this to the news at that time that IT BHU would be soon converted to an IIT. Since, now the bill to convert IT BHU to an IIT is already in the Parliament, I would expect this trend to continue this year.

IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi continued their improvement in closing ranks. Many more people showed willingness to opt for Guwahati last year. I think this is because of the improved connectivity through cheap airlines as well as a few more trains to the city. IIT Madras could not maintain its closing ranks, primarily due to decreased number of selections from nearby areas. Surprisingly, the number of selections from Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Kerala are minuscule, and that affects the closing ranks of IIT Madras. IIT Kharagpur continues to get bad press, and hence fewer preferences. Given that this year, it has probably seen more scandals than ever before, I would expect even more candidates to avoid IIT Kharagpur in 2011.

In terms of programs, some of the longer term trends continue. Decline in Architecture, Design, Sciences, Bio-related programs, and so on. The core engineering branches were on strong upsurge, primarily Mechanical, Chemical, and Civil. Surprisingly, Aeronautical and Metallurgical engineering were in less demand, despite the fantastic news from ISRO and continued upturn in metal industry - primarily, aluminum and steel making. I guess the problems in setting up greenfield plants due to land acquisition and environmental concerns has been causing concerns amongst the students. So no hope for Metallurgy this year too.

Computer Science lost its sheen this year. For the first time in over 30 years, the first closing program was not computer science. BTech program in Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay closed at 98. But besides IIT Bombay, everywhere else Computer Science was preferred over Electrical or Electronics. But the gap has narrowed down significantly. I expect Electrical/Electronics to continue gaining over Computer Science in 2011.

Amongst the six new IITs started in 2008, the size of the city certainly appeared to be the main draw. Both Hyderabad and Gandhinagar saw improvement in their closing ranks in Electrical (compared all IITs on Electrical, as everyone had this program). The surprise was IIT Ropar, which has improved the most in terms of closing rank. I expect this year too, candidates will prefer IITs at Hyderabad and Gandhinagar.

Amongst the IITs at Indore and Mandi, Indore showed much greater improvements in the closing ranks.

IIT Joint Entrance Examination Completes Half Century of Secrecy

Finally, it is over. The 50th edition of Joint Entrance Exam (unless you count the 1997 JEE twice, when the first exam was cancelled because the question paper was leaked) is very different from the first edition in 1962, in format, in terms of number of students, number of IITs and programs, and of course, the hype that JEE generated then and now. But the two editions are not different in one important way - everything about JEE is confidential. The whole organization lacks transparency despite the flaws which has been repeatedly pointed out. At least now we have RTI, and we do come to know of some information about JEE, but often this information is delayed past the time it becomes useless.

JEE always raises more issues than other exams. This is supposedly the key to the greatest career, and hence media reports every little detail about JEE, much more than it cares for AIEEE, even though latter is taken by 2.5 times as many students as JEE.

This year, media has latched on to a couple of announcements by the organizing IIT. The first one said that the answer key will be available within 48 hours of the exam. The second one said that a scanned copy of the answersheet (ORS) will be posted online for all students, even before the result is formally announced. The third one said that the marks obtained by every candidate will be put on the website on the day the results are announced.

The links to media articles are as follows:

Deccan Herald

Times of India

Indian Express

Hindustan Times

These were great announcement. But sceptics were not convinced that this was really going to happen.

JEE already has the answer keys prepared by the same group who prepared the question paper. But the key is not announced because there is a fear that some mistake might have crept in, and if that mistake is detected, there will be a loss of face for the venerable IITs. This time, they promised that the keys will be announced soon after the exam is over, so that students and others can point out mistakes, if any, and then JEE can take those objections into account to decide the final key or grading policy, which will be fair to everyone. Seems like an excellent idea, but an organization built over secrecy for 50 years is not going to let out even the genuine information. It does not matter whether this is fair or not. And sure enough, JEE has gone back on this announcement.

Here is the link for the news report:

Times of India

Now, the key will be announced only after 15th May. How will this enable others to offer feedback before the result is out. We don't know. Why couldn't it be done on 11th April. We don't know. But JEE is sacrosanct within IIT system. You don't ask such questions about God.

Posting of scanned answerbooks (ORS) was to give confidence to students that the technology used by IITs in scanning and recording answers is fool proof and does correct evaluation in all cases. Of course, if it did make an occasional error, then the student can point that out and IIT will fix it before the result is formally out. Seems fair enough. This was done after Allahabad High Court gave a ruling in another exam of BHU that the students should have access to the ORS sheets. (As one would notice that almost all "reforms" in JEE are forced either by courts or by RTI or by Ministry, and the only role of IITs is to delay those reforms till they can.)

However, just putting the scanned copy of the ORS on the web was not good enough. This does not help the student at all, unless you also put on the web how each has been graded. Ideally, the website should have a scanned copy of ORS and what was the right answer for each question, and what is the answer that the JEE evaluation mechanism has recorded. If all this information is there, only then a student can request correction. But this was not to be.

Even the announcement of putting scanned ORS on web has been diluted and now there are doubts whether it will be done before the result is formally announced and counselling process is launched, giving time to students to request correction. The link to the media is:

Hindustan Times

Why is IIT doing this. Apparently, they are afraid that a large number of students may request regrading. Actually, that can be handled very easily. Put a charge of Rs. 1000 for regrading request. After several boards handle many more students, many more exams, and still allow the option of regrading. And the regrading requests are small because one wouldn't pay the regrading charges unless there is a real chance of making to IITs or improving the rank. The real reason is different. I don't think IITs have the confidence in their own processes. There is a fear that if they give out all this information, there may be a large number of cases where the scanning has resulted in significantly different marks. And if that indeed happens, then IITs lose respect, and there is a delay in admission process. And for IITs, the brand equity and the timetable of admission process is lot more important than the fairness to all candidates.

JEE is also afraid that some students will go to court on frivolous counts if a lot of information is revealed before the admission process is over. (Later on, they are forced to reveal it through RTI anyway, but it is too late for most students to approach courts.) But is this fear out of some genuine experience. Have courts stayed admission process through AIEEE which is much transparent than IIT JEE, and which provides the basis for admission into hundreds of engineering colleges. Have JEE lost court cases in the past which were frivolous in nature. What they are really saying is that they don't trust the High Courts of the country, and they can act like that since they are the IITs.

There is still time to act. One hopes that if enough people put pressure on IITs to do the right thing, they may actually do what they promised last month. Improved transparency will be a great move forward by JEE in its Golden Jubilee Year.

Poor gender ratio in IITs and other top institutes

I thank my good friend Salil Dave to have forwarded the following link on admission stats at MIT. Interestingly, MIT selects ~20% of the girls who apply and only ~8% of the boys - since more than twice the number of males apply than females, the net effect is that the incoming class has about the same number of boys and girls. Assuming that the applicant abilities are not a function of gender, this is a deliberate admissions policy to have a 'balanced' class.

I thought it was pretty obvious that neither the abilities of women are any less than men when it comes to science in 12th class, nor are their performance in engineering disciplines any less when it comes to engineering institutes. In fact, one can go over the results of 12th class board exams in any state in India, and one will find that amongst the top 100 or top 1000, the girls actually perform marginally better than boys. And, when one looks at performance of girls in engineering colleges, it has been reported that there is no difference.

Given all this, the obvious fallout is that if an institute is keen to admit the best possible students, it should try to have a class which is gender balanced. If your admission process does not result in a gender-balanced class, there is something wrong with the process, and it needs to be relooked into.

Less than 10 percent of the students admitted to undergraduate programs at IITs are girls. In view of above, this is extremely serious. There may be a large number of reasons for this serious imbalance. Parents may not want to spend money on coaching of their daughters, when they have no problems to do it for their sons. Parents may not want to send their daughters to far away places like Kota for coaching. (And there is no denying that most people who get selected in JEE today come in after a serious amount of coaching.) May be females can't take the stress of a single exam deciding lifetime of choices. May be there are other reasons as well.

It is important that IITs try to understand those reasons and then try to come up with an admission process which ensures that despite all such reasons, they still get the best possible students, which they are not getting right now.

It is interesting to note that such a problem exists only in the top 50 odd institutions (amongst engineering ones). The reason is not difficult to see. Due to coaching, the relative ranking of boys go up by a few 10s of thousands ranks. If we just look at 12th class performance, then, as we said earlier, in top 1000, there are 500+ girls and 500- boys (because 12th class exams are generally without excessive coaching). But in top 1000 of JEE or AIEEE, there will be only 5 percent girls. This percentage of girls keep increasing as ranks lower and at 50000+ ranks, one starts seeing about 50 percent girls. So all institutions who take the students from top 10,000 ranks would have the worst gender ratio. Institutions who are in the middle and take admission from ranks 10,000 to 50,000 primarily would have a better gender ratio, and institutes who admit students beyond 50,000 rank, would have no gender imbalance.

Any good university in the world will study the profile of students joining it, and if it notices that a certain class of good students are missing, it would study whether it is because they are not attracted to the university or it is because the university's admission process is in some way excluding them. In either case, some steps will be taken to remedy the problem.

The top institutions in India too should relook at their admission strategy and find ways to admit more girl students not because of some equal access issues, but because it will improve the average performance of the class.

Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. Particularly looking at IITs, the JEE has always been a holy cow. You can't criticize it. To argue that JEE has not been admitting the best students all along will cause major ripples amongst the alumni, because it is directly questioning whether they were the best. And no faculty member in IITs, in general, would want to admit that they teach anyone but the best. So there is no incentive to change, and as long as National Commission for Women is silent on this, so much the better.

So, changes in JEE are almost always pushed from the politicians and bureaucrats (and then we complain about lack of autonomy, interference, etc. if you don't fix your house, someone else will). And politicians have so far focused on caste based access. May be they haven't realized the gender-based inequity. But one day they will. I only hope that that day comes sooner than later, because a mechanism to improve gender equity will only improve the quality of students in IITs and other top institutions.

Now, the obvious question is what can be done. There are multiple ways to handle this problem. One is, of course, to make major changes in JEE so that coaching has less possibility of enhancing success in JEE. That is a very long-term issue, and I have written about it in my earlier blogs as well, and I really don't think a major well thought of change to JEE is possible.

The other possibilities are based on assumption that JEE will remain by and large what it is. One possibility is to give extra credits (marks) to women to compensate for the difficulties they in general would have faced in JEE preparation, and through this means increase the number of girls in the merit list. This is a standard way of providing easier access to disadvantaged groups in several countries. Even in India, there are instances of attracting sports-persons to a university by giving him/her credits (add something to 12th class marks before preparing the admission merit list). A prominent central university was giving preferential treatment to people from disadvantaged backgrounds in this fashion before they were forced to apply reservations.

And, of course, the option of reservation is always there, something that we all in India understand extremely well. What we can do is to look at the current ratio (say 10 percent), and reserve a slightly higher number of seats for women (say 15 percent). Let us do this for a couple of years, and study the performance of men versus women in these batches. If the performance of women is similar to men, then we increase the reservation to 20 percent, and so on.