New Delhi, July 17: An error in the percentile calculation formula used by 29 school boards co-ordinated by the CBSE to work out the cut-off for admission into IITs has proved costly for 79 students.
The tech schools have declared these students — 35 are from the Board of Intermediate Education, Andhra Pradesh — ineligible for admission as they had not met the cut-offs fixed by the IITs. Earlier, the state board had declared them eligible.
The Andhra board had announced that general students securing 90.4 per cent in the Class XII science stream would be eligible for admission into the IITs. But the IITs raised the cut-off to 91.8 per cent because of an error in the board’s percentile math.
“Our admission is already over. Nothing can be done now,” H.C. Gupta, the IIT-JEE-Advanced chairperson, said.
Starting this year, there have been several changes in the admission process to IITs and NITs. A two-tier entrance exam — JEE-Main and JEE-Advanced — have been introduced in place of the IIT-JEE and the All India Engineering Entrance Examination .
The IITs had fixed the top 20 percentile of respective boards as eligible for admission into their courses. An individual’s percentile is calculated by dividing the number of examinees below him/her by the total number of candidates. The result is then multiplied by 100.
The CBSE had asked the state boards to consider the total number of students taking the Class XII test under that board as the sample size for working out the cut-off for the top 20 percentile.
Accordingly, the boards announced their cut-offs and provided the data to the CBSE, which handed them over to the IITs. The IITs, however, found the sample size misleading.
“We again calculated the cut-off by considering the total number of pass-outs from each board as the sample size. The cut-off worked out in this method varied from what the state boards had announced,” Gupta said.
This means the CBSE, which was co-ordinating with state boards, misguided them, resulting in lower cut-offs. Many students were offered seats in IITs and later denied admission. These students have moved various courts.
However, the IIT-JEE authorities have got a direction from the Supreme Court in favour of the formula they have followed.
C. Narayana, the exam controller of Andhra’s Board of Intermediate Education, said: “We merely followed the methods prescribed in the CBSE guidelines. We should not be blamed for the present problem,” he said.
CBSE officials could not be reached for comment.
HRD minister M.M. Pallam Raju said prima facie “it was a misunderstanding” among boards on how to calculate the cut-off.
