New Delhi, April 30: Students who appeared for the IIT Joint Entrance Examination in Hindi performed far worse than English test takers over the past two years, suggesting a possible language disadvantage that errors in this year’s examination may have amplified.

Hindi test takers were disproportionately unsuccessful compared with their English counterparts in the IIT-JEE in 2008 and 2009, data accessed by The Telegraph from the organisers’ confidential reports for the two years reveal.

The trend suggested by the data for 2008 and 2009 extends to earlier years too, confirmed top sources among IIT-JEE organisers — two days before the institutes unveil a damage-control road map after this year’s errors.

The IITs are scheduled to announce on May 2 how they plan to compensate for errors in the question papers that could have selectively hurt Hindi test takers.

Human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has already expressed his unhappiness over the errors to the IIT directors. Around 4.5 lakh students appeared for the IIT-JEE this year.

The errors misled Hindi test takers about the true weightage of several questions, which these students may not have attempted to the best of their ability as a consequence.

But the reports of the organising committees of the IIT-JEE for the years 2008 and 2009 suggest that the errors may only be accentuating traditional disadvantages suffered by students who take the test in Hindi.

The reports — which are not made public even years after the tests are over — reveal that Hindi test takers had a much lower success rate than those who took the test in English.

In 2008, Hindi test takers comprised 13.08 per cent of the total 3.15 lakh students who appeared for the IIT-JEE. But only 1.27 per cent of the successful candidates were Hindi test takers.

Last year, students who appeared for the test in Hindi constituted 12.86 per cent of the total number of students who appeared for the examination. But only 1.84 per cent of the qualified students took the IIT-JEE in Hindi.

In contrast, English test takers who constituted 86.92 per cent and 87.14 per cent of aspirants in 2008 and 2009 respectively made up 98.73 per cent and 98.16 per cent of successful students respectively in the two years.

These statistics cover all categories of seats — general, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Other Backward Classes and physically disadvantaged.

Poorer performance of a group is often interpreted as equivalent to lower merit.

SC/ST, OBC and women students are often said to be less “meritorious” because their average performance is often below that of general category students.

But vast differences in performance between two groups, observed over large samples — as in the case of the IIT-JEE — are also attributed globally to likely disadvantages one group suffers.

The historical disadvantages suffered by SC/ST and OBC students are the reasons cited by the government for reservations across higher educational institutions for them.

A key reason behind the poorer performance of Hindi test takers as compared with those who appear for the IIT-JEE in English may be the inability of the former set to benefit from coaching classes, sources said.

Most IIT-JEE coaching classes are centred around metros and special hubs like Kota, and invariably train students to take the test in English.