IIT aspirants at a coaching centre in Kota. (File picture)

Kota, Aug. 31: The IITs may be thinking of scrapping Kota as an admission test centre amid suspicions of mass cheating, but the coaching capital is unfazed.

The IIT proposal, a decision on which has been deferred for now, was mooted after the extremely high success rate among students who took this year’s joint entrance examination (JEE) from centres in this Rajasthan town.

But coaching centres here, whose trainees fill up a third of IIT seats though less than a fifth of them sit their test from Kota, scoff at any suggestion of cheating.

“Kota’s consistent good results are because of the genuineness of the students and the honesty of the teachers. Besides, who has the time to cheat: the papers are tough and take long enough to solve,” Bansal Classes CEO Pramod Bansal said. “We are open to any kind of surprise checks.”

Bansal Classes produced six of this year’s IIT-JEE top 10. Bansal, who pioneered coaching in the city in 1986 with one student, said: “Shitikant, this year’s IIT-JEE topper, is a Bansalite. Make him or any of our other students sit in any other centre in any other city, they will come out with flying colours.”

At least 15,000 students groomed in the town’s 120-odd coaching centres sit the exam every year, with about 2,500 taking it from the six to seven centres allotted to Kota.

“If Kota is dropped as an exam centre, that will not affect us in any way,” Bansal added.

Most teachers here attribute the local coaching institutes’ success to the unique “Kota module” of updated study material and rigorous teaching by quality faculty. The coaching schools hold not only an entrance exam but also periodic tests with IIT-JEE-type questions to assess their standard of teaching.

The students can take extra tuition in specific subjects. Also, a student of one institute can make use of the test series of another to gauge his preparedness.

“The IITs are now considering raising the eligibility cutoff from 60 to 70 per cent (in the Class XII board exams). Our cutoff has been 75 per cent for a long time,” Bansal said.

“Kota’s strongest point is its classroom coaching. Here the owners themselves are teachers,” said Manoj Sharma, general manager of Resonance, another coaching institute that has centres in Calcutta, Delhi and Jaipur too.

“They don’t delegate teaching but find time to teach even if their institutes have expanded. Kanpur and Delhi have more coaching institutes than Kota. Delhi produces the highest number of civil servants, but nobody complains about that!”

Sharma added: “Of our 250 teachers, 49 are IITians. We have performance-based incentives for our teachers based on student feedback. Teachers’ monthly salaries start at Rs 30,000 and can go up to Rs 3 lakh.”

However, it’s Kota’s high success rate — one out of seven makes it to an IIT compared with the national average of one out of 50 — that has raised the suspicions.

There were instances this year where over 20 students cracked the IIT-JEE from the same room at a Kota centre, a source said. The average student strength in each room was less than 40, so more than half the candidates from these rooms cleared the exam.

Kota’s coaching centre owners, teachers and students are indignant at the insinuations about the city’s booming “education economy” that churns out Rs 500 crore annually.

Some 50,000 students from across the country have made this dusty town on the Chambal’s banks their home to pursue their IIT dream.

This has spurred a building boom, with coaching institute owners adding floors to serve as dorms and hostels, and shop owners expanding to add restaurants.

A student spends about Rs 1 lakh a year, including Rs 50,000-60,000 in tuition fees. Geetika, Biplab and Shika, who have come from Haryana, say Kota is value for money.

“We could have gone to Delhi for coaching but chose Kota since it churns out so many toppers. There are fewer distractions here — no pubs or malls — and the competitive environment motivates us to study harder,” Geetika said.

The trio can stay and study in Kota because their schools in Haryana have relaxed attendance norms to let them focus on the IIT entrance. “We miss our families but the bigger goal is an IIT seat,” Shika said.