This article provides interesting statistics about IIT-JEE 2007 results, which was declared yesterday. The IIT-JEE is held for seven IITs (not six as mentioned in the article), IT-BHU and Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad.
The article:
West zone grabs most IIT seats
31 May, 2007 l 0443 hrs IST l TIMES NEWS NETWORK
MUMBAI: The maximum number of students who have made it to the IITs this year are from the Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi zones, but an unexpected corner of India has produced the topper—Kot Kapura in Punjab.
On Wednesday, the country's premier engineering colleges, the IITs, announced the results of their highly competitive joint entrance exam, the JEE.
Of the 2.51 lakh candidates who braved the JEE this year—a marked decrease of nearly 50,000 from last year—7,200 made it to the six IITs, IT-BHU in Varanasi and the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad. The results showed an overall improvement in performance due to an easier two-paper format, said officials.
The drop in the number of aspirants was attributed to the fact that from 2006, the IITs have allowed students only two strikes at the JEE. The all-India topper, Achin Bansal, is from Kot Kapura, a small town in Faridkot district in north Punjab. "There is no engineering college in my town, so I decided to give the JEE a shot," said Bansal, who plans to join IIT-Bombay.
Nitish Srivastana, who ranked second, is from Dehradun, and Ambrose Birani, who stood third, from Indore. The big shift this year is the jump in the percentage of girls who have succeeded in breaching this traditionally male bastion. This year 587 girls have made it, up from 394 in 2006. The highest-scoring girl candidate, Ankita Sharma from Mumbai, said it was a "don't give up" attitude that got her to the 55th rank.
The JEE-2007 list was released without setting aside seats for Other Backward Classes (OBC) students. Organising JEE chairman H S Pandalai said the Union HRD ministry had asked the IITs to declare the results based on last year's reservation policy.
The seven IITs together have 4,193 seats for the 116 streams they offer at the undergraduate level and the five-year integrated MSc programmes.
Of those who qualified, the maximum were from the Mumbai zone comprising the five western states. While the number of applicants from the zone has dropped, the percentage of successful candidates has gone up dramatically. Of every 100 Mumbai zone students who took the exam, almost five made it.
This year too a number of foreign students took the JEE, but of 120 only six qualified. Foreign students are admitted into the IITs over and above their sanctioned intake.
J M Vasi, deputy director of IIT-B, said that the two-paper pattern was easier on the students and helped them perform better. The IITs will analyse this year's results to decide on whether or not to raise the bar for JEE-2008.
Although almost 18% of the candidates who sat for the JEE this year were OBC students, they were judged as part of the general stream. Quotas for the scheduled castes (15%), scheduled tribes (7.5%) and physically challenged (3%) continue to be implemented.