Bhubaneswar, July 13: There was a time when only the best brains made it to engineering colleges. Now, it seems, even the worst can make the cut.

Students who appeared for the Odisha Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE)-2012 and didn’t attempt a single question or scored negative marks would not find it difficult to grab engineering seats. For, the peculiarity of the joint entrance test is that there is no minimum cut-off score, thereby serving no practical purpose.

The scorecards of the students available with The Telegraph revealed some shocking facts.

A candidate, who scored –59 out of 720, has found a place in the OJEE-2012 “merit” list. So have 610 others who have scored negative marks. More than one-third of the 63,634 students, who took the test, have managed to secure ranks despite scoring in single-digits (0-9).

Only about 10 per cent candidates secured 40 per cent marks, which is the minimum pass marks for school and college board exams. The number of students crossing 50 per cent marks stood at 1,224, barely two per cent of the total number of examinees.

Of the 16,907 outstation candidates, only 254 scored more than 50 per cent. While 6,819 others scored in single digits, 907 got negative marks.

Students, who appear for OJEE, never get to know their marks and are simply given ranks on the basis of which admissions are conducted. The entrance test has total marks of 720.

“Gone are the days when students burnt the midnight oil to make it to engineering colleges. With the mushrooming of technical institutes, students have become slack,” said Suresh Moharana, a senior faculty member of Utkal University.

Each of these OJEE “rank holders” is approached by not less than 40 different institutes.

The craze for technical education in the state has hardly taken a beating even after almost half of the 41,000-odd seats in engineering college lay vacant for the past three years.

The state government has been trying to stop opening any more engineering colleges but entrepreneurs are trying to come up with new institutes on the plea of All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE)’s approval.

“Any student with the worst possible marks is considered eligible for admissions if he or she is willing to pay the fees,” said a faculty member of a reputed city-based engineering college. No wonder associations of technical colleges have been demanding lowering the eligibility criteria for engineering aspirants from 45 per cent to 35 per cent in Plus Two.

“As if this was not enough, there are colleges that are running to courts to enrol below-par students for second shift classes,” the teacher added.