New Delhi, May 18: From this year, the IITs will have an “exit policy” aimed at plugging seat vacancies that occur when students quietly drop out to join other engineering colleges where they may have bagged a seat in a preferred course.
Under the new policy, a student will have his registration fee refunded if he surrenders his seat, which can then be allotted to a waitlisted candidate. Earlier, the institutes did not offer a refund, so the students who dropped out had no incentive to inform the authorities.
If the refund is one incentive — a general candidate pays Rs 40,000 as registration fee while a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe candidate pays Rs 20,000 — the IITs are offering another.
“If the candidate tells us he wants to surrender his seat, we will allow him to appear in the JEE the next year,” IIT-Joint Entrance Examination chairman G.B. Reddy said today, announcing the new policy. Candidates who drop out after registration are not allowed to appear in the IIT-JEE again.
The premier tech institutes have been witnessing around five to 10 per cent seat vacancy every year in the undergraduate courses. Last year, all the IITs together accounted for 762 vacancies, of which 650 were the result of dropouts (about 100 seats stayed vacant in the physically disabled category as there were not enough candidates).
Reddy admitted that the lack of an exit policy had contributed to the vacancies. “The candidates, after being allotted certain courses, were not joining (but) they were not informing the IITs about their decision (either). Hence many seats were lying vacant,” he said.
The main reason for the substantial dropout rate is that a candidate who has failed to bag his course of choice can’t immediately be sure he would get his preferred course in, say, the NITs, which follow the IITs in the pecking order. This is because the NIT selections take place after the IIT admissions are over.
So, the student pays his IIT registration fee and blocks the seat he has secured — and drops out later after securing an NIT seat in his preferred course.
After the JEE results are out, the IITs shortlist about double the number of candidates as there are seats. The short-listed students are invited for counselling, a process where they make their choice of courses known. They are then allotted courses depending on their rank and preferences as well as the overall demand for each course.
Till 2008, the IITs followed a one-round allotment system. In 2009 and 2010, they conducted a second round to fill up whatever seats remained, and last year they carried out three rounds.
An IIT teacher said the new policy would not lower the vacancy rate substantially, because the deadline for surrendering seats will precede the third round of allotments (so that the surrendered seats too can be filled in that round). He said most of last year’s dropouts had been allotted their seats in the third round.
“Seats in most preferred subjects are allotted in the first round (when the higher rankers are invited). The remaining seats, mostly in the less-preferred courses, go to the waitlisted candidates, many of whom opt out later,” the teacher said.
Reddy said it might not be possible to conduct more than three rounds of allotments. “We have to finish the allotments before July so that classes can be started,” he said.
He announced the results of this year’s IIT-JEE. Out of the 479,651 who took the exam, 17,462 have been short-listed for counselling. They include 1,908 girls. There are 9,647 seats up for grabs in the 15 IITs, the Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), and the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad.
