Class XII marks Soon to be Not Considered for Engineering Admissions

From next academic session or the one following that (2017), Class XII board marks would not affect the admissions of students to all the central engineering institutes other than IITs, if a Central Seat Allocation Board (CASB) recommendation gets acceptance from Ministry of Human Resource and Development. This would make JEE scores the only marker for admission of students. In response to the same the competitive exams for engineering admission will be held a little earlier, as according to authorities it would need additional time for the admission procedure.

This year there was a huge gaffe in admission due to delay of releasing Class XII results by the boards to CBSE. There were other glitches in scores of some students as well. Taking these loopholes in to consideration the CSAB recommended the Ministry to take up admission based on the JEE (Main) scores alone. According to this new model, the 40% weightage that was given to class XII scores for admissions in NITs and other GFTI’s (other than IITs) would now become obsolete and the admissions would take place based only on the scores attained by the students in JEE (Mains).  CSAB is part of the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA), which would make the recommendation in this year’s admission report to the ministry.

According to M P Singh, coordinator of the Central Seat Allocation Board (CSAB) from NIT Patna, “Many of the 47 higher secondary boards in the country are not sending their scores on time to the CBSE. Some of them are not submitting it in the pro forma given by the board, leading to discrepancies. Keeping in mind students’ interests, we will be asking the apex body to conduct admissions only on the basis of the JEE (Main) scores.

According to a JoSAA official, “There were some students whose marks were higher than what they actually stored in their class XII. Such students managed to get a seat on the basis of the ‘hiked’ score in the joint seat allocation process. This came to light only during the document-verification step, when it was too late to make changes. Though the number of such cases was not very high, some of the deserving candidates may have lost out on their merit seat due to such discrepancies.

Along with recommending the change the Joint Entrance Examination Apex Board has also set up a sub-committee to review the process of allotting JEE (Main) ranks. When the two tier examination (JEE Mains and JEE Advanced) got introduced, the class XII scores were into account for admission of the students which began from 2012. The apex board has now after three years decided to review the process which would control the proliferation of private coaching institutes in the country.

Speaking about time taken for the total admission process and extending the time span to 1.5 months, JoSAA co-chairman Devang Khakhar said, “For the process to be smooth, we have recommended that it be started at least 15 days before we started this year.” According to another IIT Director, “That will mean advancing the exam by half a month. For, after the two tests (JEE Main and JEE Advanced), we also allow candidates to view their answer sheets and get their feedback, before we finally declare the results. The entire process is also spread out by a month.”