NIT Admission Issue in High Court

I have just received the following email from Mr. Neeraj Mehrotra.

We have challenged the normalisation procedure being adopted in JEE (Mains) 2013 in AP High Court, Hyderabad vide Writ Petition No. 18252 of 2013. The writ petition came for admission before Hon’ble Justice Ramesh Ranganathan today on 27 Jun 2013.

The hon’ble Court has admitted the writ petition and has directed the respondents viz. Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi, JEE Apex Board (JAB) Central Board of Secondary Education, Delhi and the Executive Director,JEE (Main) New Delhi to file the counter affidavits within two weeks. The Hon’ble Court further directed that admissions to be made into NITs / CFTIs is subject to further orders in the writ petition and directed the respondents to intimate all admitted candidates that their admission is subject to further orders and final outcome of the writ petition pending before the High Court of AP. Sri Ponnam Ashok Goud, Asst Solicitor General, Hyderabad was present in the court and has taken the notices on behalf of the respondents.

He has requested JEE Mains authorities to not release the rank list till the final order is issued in this petition.

I am trying to get a copy of the exact order, but assuming that everything written above is correct interpretation of the order, then JEE Mains can go ahead with declaration of results/ranks, and NITs/CFTIs can go ahead with the counseling and the admission process. But there will be an uncertainty regarding whether they will finally get admission or not.

Two weeks to Government/CBSE/JEE means that they can submit the response by 11th July, and then the court will decide a date of hearing. This is a fairly complex issue, and hence the decision may not be immediate.

Note that the decision appears to be applicable to only NIT/CFTI admissions. Apparently the private universities can go ahead with the admission based on ranks issued by CBSE (if they ignore the request of the applicants and announce the ranks).

Indeed a very interesting development, but given the kind of reaction that the normalization process was getting, it was only to be expected. But how should students react to this (if everything is being correctly interpreted above).

If students have to chose between some NIT and another institute not affected by the court order, it would be preferred to not get into a zone of uncertainty, and choose other fine institutions. I would expect that this order would benefit places like ISM Dhanbad, BITS, IIIT Hyderabad/Delhi/Bangalore, DAIICT, LNMIIT very significantly, as students would rather take a guaranteed seat in these institutions than face the possibility that their admission may be cancelled at any time, or at least their department can be changed any time.


But an interesting development to follow. And expect updates on this page.

Update on 28th June, 07:00 PM.

The issue has been covered by the local Hyderabad media.

Here is the report in Deccan Chronicle and in Times of India, Hyderabad edition.

A Guide to JEE Counseling 2013

The JEE (advanced) results are out. And, I am getting emails to write something. But I can't really write much for two reasons. One, IIT Kanpur has its convocation scheduled on 5th July, in which President of India is the Chief Guest, and I am the person responsible for organizing it. Hence cannot afford time to write long blog articles and respond to all emails that it generates. Two, people within IITK tell me that I have lost my freedom the day I agreed to become Dean of Academic Affairs. If I write which can potentially be interpreted as "IIT X is better than IITK in some respect" then it would be highly improper. (Which means that I won't rewrite my guide in 2014 either.)

So this year, I intend to do the following. I will write a bit, and will come back and write a bit more, as and when time permits. So this article will not be static but will keep getting updated.

First of all, you may want to look at the articles I wrote in 2011, and then in 2012.

Next, the changes at IITK. We finally have the rules and framework in place for the most liberal under-graduate program that you can have in India. When you get admission in a particular under-graduate program (including in science), there will be opportunities to do a minor (3-4 courses) in another discipline, or do a secondary major (9-11 courses). There will also be opportunities to do a master's degree along with your undergraduate degree, which could be in the same discipline or in a different discipline. For example, you could do BTech-MTech dual degree in any engineering discipline, or a BS-MS dual degree in any science discipline, or even BTech in an engineering discipline, and MS in a science discipline, or BS in science and MTech in engineering, or BTech in one engineering discipline and MTech in another engineering discipline. All options are open subject to performance of the student. One can also do a BS or BTech followed by MBA, as yet another option. One can also change from existing disciplines to an inter-disciplinary under-graduate program called BTech in Engineering Science. This program is available only after you have completed one year of studies at IITK and is not available through JEE. We have also made our branch change much more liberal than in the past.

Some students of IIT Bombay have created this site which proposes to help students in making the right choices of discipline. I hope other IITs come up with similar sites.

Another very interesting initiative is by IIT Gandhinagar. They are conducting an open house, where anyone within a rank of 4000 can visit their campus and learn about IITGn.  At last, the IITs are learning what the students and parents always knew, that there is a competition for good students amongst IITs, and unless IITs try to attract students, they won't get them.

Added on 22nd June, 09:00 AM

IIT BHU alumni and students have also created this site to provide information to prospective students. The JEE aspirants were never wooed so much in the past.

Added on 22nd June, 02:00 PM

I am fascinated by Economics as a subject, and try to read about it. I was really excited when IITK decided to start an undergraduate program in Economics. Here is a blog by one of the most passionate Economics faculty member of IIT Kanpur for all those who have qualified in JEE advance.

Added on 24th June, 01:00 AM

IIT Kanpur students have started a forum for providing information to prospective students. You will need to have a facebook account and join the group.

Added on 27th June, 02:00 PM

IIT Madras have created a forum on their website for answering queries of prospective students.




I will keep adding such snippets as I find more time and I get to know of more such things. But no comments here.

School Board Results: Moderation or Tampering

Last week, Debarghya Das shocked us by writing a blog on quora, Hacking into the Indian Education System. He revealed two things. One, at least one of the boards did not care for privacy of its students. Two, the marks awarded to the students were not as one would expect in a public exam. The dust had hardly settled (which just means that we were about to forget the story, not that there were any explanations from the board) when Prashant Bhattacharji wrote yet another blog, Exposing CBSE and ICSE: Statistical Insights into the True Lies on your Marksheets. This blog shows that similar things happen in CBSE as well.

When I read the two blogs, I said to myself, there must be some academic reason for the boards to change marks, to moderate the marks as they call it. The search on CBSE site leads me to the following moderation policy.:

MODERATION POLICY OF BOARD’S EXAMINATION

 

Prior to declaration of results of Senior School Certificate (Class XII) and Secondary School (Class X) the Board adopts the Moderation Policy in the following manner: 

 

1. To compensate the candidates for the difficulties experienced in solving the question in a specified time due to misinterpretation/ambiguity of questions anderrors, if any, leading to multiplicity of performance and causing constraints on consumption of time for other questions.
2. To compensate the vagaries and to bring uniformity in the evaluation process.
3. To bring parity on account of element of subjectivity involved in the evaluation process.
4. To level up the mean achievements in the set-wise performance of the candidates attributable to the difference in the difficulty level of different sets of question papers in the multiple sets scheme.
5. To maintain a near parity of pass percentage of the candidates in the current year vis-à-vis preceding years, subject-wise and overall.

 

The moderation policy is too vague and does not help us understand how the marks are actually changed. The two blogs, particularly the first one, has been covered extensively by media. A lot of questions have been raised which are very uncomfortable and indeed are leading to the public at large losing whatever little faith that had in the boards. This also happens to be the time when the government is asking the public to have faith in the boards, by including the performance in the boards for admission to engineering programs across the country.

Given the timing of these two blogs and the ongoing admission process, one would have hoped that the government would act swiftly and ask the boards to explain the moderation policy at the earliest. They would have explained their policies. We would have pointed flaws in those policies and would have requested them to change those policies in future, but at the end of the day, we would have been happy that the policies were only increasing the marks without any explanation (like fitting the marks on a curve), and the whole process was not completely random. As time passes by, the faith in boards keep reducing and the belief that the changes in the marks are for non-academic reasons keep increasing. Even if there is a good academic reason to do such moderation, it must be made public. We all know what lack of transparency could do even in IIT JEE in the past.

The two blogs strengthen the already strong case that consideration of board marks for engineering admissions was always a bad idea. And notice that CBSE is considered to be amongst the best managed boards in the country. One wonders if that reputation is well deserved, and if it is, then what would be happening in the other boards. But what is clear is that unless boards come clean on their academic processes, they can't be trusted to the extent of using their marksheets in the admission process for highly competitive colleges and universities.

There are other issues that the data is pointing to. There appears to be an extremely liberal policy on grace marks. Do the boards provide an outcome of a course. Do they say things like, "someone who passes an English test can write one page in English on a topic of current interest without too many grammar and spelling errors." Do their passing criteria meet those outcomes. Or are all boards trying to compete with each other in increasing the pass percentage (and making their political masters happy as a result of such a result).

I wouldn't want to use terms like fraud, tampering, lies, etc., for now. I hope the boards will explain all this soon and we will have a chance to discuss their policies as academicians.