HRD minister Kapil Sibal recently mooted the idea of applying a cutoff of between 80% – 85% in XII board exams to be eligible for the JEE. There are 2 problems with this idea. The first is the assumption that all boards (ICSE, CBSE, state & others) have the same syllabus and use the same marking regime. This assumption is false. It is common folk wisdom among students that boards vary in toughness (or perceived toughness), some boards have a more lenient marking system than others. It is easier to get higher subject scores in some boards than others. Boards vary
Till recently BITS Pilani had no entrance exam, students were admitted on the basis of their XII marks. Since BITS Pilani recognizes that “Boards vary”, they tried to map the percentages to percentiles in an attempt to create uniform merit lists. They have since dropped this scheme and setup an entrance exam – BITSAT. BITSAT performs one function – “normalize” the marks of all applicants. This ties in with my second point & the second problem with Minister Sibal’s plan — Minisiter Sibal is ignoring the one great virtue of the JEE exam, that it is a “great normalizer”. Irrespective of the board you are from you must pass one common exam, based on one common syllabus. All the variations between boards are smoothed out by your performance in this one common exam. If a high board cutoff requirement is enforced, all the syllabus & marking variations between boards will get magnified. The higher the cutoff, the greater the board differences come into play.
A direct result of enforcing a high board cut-off will be that students & parents are going to demand lenient marking systems. In my opinion this will most certainly cause leniency in marking standards of state boards. Because state boards are smaller than central boards and it is easier for people to petition their state education minister, it is very likely that state boards will be the first to loosen up their scoring system. This will lead to increased competition between boards in the scoring & examination system, a state board can give more people a shot at IIT by making their exams easier, which defeats the raison d’etre of a high cutoff filter
The JEE system should be improved from the inside and not by tacking on an arbitrary external filter.
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BITS Pilani still has the same condition – at least 80% in PCM even after BITSAT. BITS’ main aim is not to be a burden on students and not to lead to the mushrooming of more Coaching institutions, hence it keeps its exams (BITSAT) at the Board level only.
In fact, a study at all IITs indicated that:
1. There is a correlation of almost 1 between Board Marks and IIT GPA.
2. There is very little correlation between JEE Rank and IIT GPA.
http://www.indianexpress.com/storyOld.php?storyId=80171