Monday 15 April 2013

Reserved students ruled out of JEE 2013?

Thousands of students from the reserved categories might be denied the chance to appear for the second round of JEE this year as the organizers have failed to foresee a problem. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the organizers of the JEE (Main) exam, will shortlist candidates for the second and final round, JEE (Advanced), based on their performance in the first.

The problem is that reserved category students who appeared for JEE (Main) were required to do so merely based on their caste or tribe claim (SC, ST or OBC), without any supporting documents (see graphic for a lucid illustration of the problem).

While SC (15%) and ST (7.5%) claims are rarely false, OBC (27%) claims often are. This is generally not deliberate and arises out of mismatches between state and central OBC category lists.

Last year, out of 4,800 OBC candidates who qualified for the IITs, 800 withdrew their claims and sought seats in the open (general) category.

"Several times, students claim they belong to a particular caste, which is considered as OBC by his or her state, but not by the Centre. Such candidates are rejected," said an IIT official. "Also, non-creamy layer certificates are issued every financial year. If one is outdated (as income can change every year), it is rejected. Every IIT gets such cases."

Caste or tribe proof documents are usually sought at the time of admission. But this year, the documents should have been a requirement at the application stage given the two-tier exam system, said Dr Ishwarchandra Nagre, a parent from Aurangabad. "Even if a couple of thousand reserved category students make false claims or fail to produce valid documents, the same number of genuine students who could not get selected because of scoring less than the false-claim students will miss their chance to try for a coveted IIT seat."

The top 1.5 lakh scorers in JEE (Main) will be in the shortlist for JEE (Advanced). Applying quotas, around 40,500 candidates will be OBC, 22,500 SC and and 11,250 ST.

An IIT official said the onus is on the CBSE to give the IITs an authentic list of 1.5 lakh candidates from JEE (Main). "For us, that would be an authentic list as it is coming from the board."

CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi said he did not know the IITs' admission process. "I will have to discuss it with the IITs to see if there is merit in the claim and what should be done about it."

The results of JEE (Main) with the eligibility list for JEE (Advanced) will be declared on May 7.

THE PROBLEM

Form-filling stage

Say, 10 lakh students fill JEE forms. Of them, assume for simplicity that 5 lakh are from the general category, and 5 lakh from the reserved categories (SC, ST and OBC)

The only requirement for a student to qualify for the exam as a reserved category student at the form-filling stage is a claim of that status and not submission of a document to support the claim

Exam stage

5 lakh general category and 5 lakh reserved category students appear for JEE (Main), based on our assumption

Of them, a shortlist of 75,000 general category and 75,000 reserved category students, based on merit, is prepared for JEE (Advanced). For the sake of simplicity, 49.5% reservation has been rounded off to 50%

If 5,000 reserved category students made false claims, they will still take the test

This will deny an opportunity to 5,000 genuine reserved category students—who could not be in the shortlist because they scored below the 5,000 who made false claims—from taking JEE (Advanced)

If some of those who made false claims clear JEE (Advanced), they will eventually be denied admission as they would not be able to submit documents to back their claims

This, however, would not undo the wrong done to the genuine students who could not take JEE (Advanced)

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/entrance-exams/Reserved-students-ruled-out-of-JEE-2013/articleshow/19551182.cms?

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