IITs to relax SC/ST cut-offs

Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the premier Indian engineering institute has decided to increase the relaxation of scores in aggregate cut-off numbers from current 40% to 50% to fill up all the reserved seats scheduled for Schedule Caste (SC) and Schedule Tribe (ST) students from the next academic year.

This year, IITs could not fill up all the reserved seats of SC/ST students and 66 total seats are still vacant in all seven IITs. This year, six new IITs- Gandhinagar, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and in Punjab and Rajasthan containing each with 120 seats including 27 per cent reserved quota are at the edge of opening. The government had also announced last year to increase the quota for SC/ST students in all old IITs that would collectively enhance the reserved number of seats in the next session, which will be difficult for IITs to fill up all the seats of reserve quota in its present admission procedure.

In this regard, the directors of all seven IITs have convened a meeting on Sunday at IIT Kharaghpur, West Bengal, and decided to ease the cut-off numbers barrier for the reserved categories students. The directors have also sent ‘the cut-off relaxation’ proposal to the Ministry of Human Resource Development for approval.

According to this proposal, the directors have suggested to allow a 50% relaxation of scores for reserved category students including physically handicapped as against the current 40%, for the next Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) that is scheduled in April 2009.

In this admission-year when a general category student became eligible by getting overall 172 scores out of 489, the aggregate cut-off for an SC/ST student was 104 after 40% relaxation. And in respect to the latest decision of granting 50% relaxation, it would now be 86 in the next academic year, April 2009.

“Lowering academic standards is the only way to fill so many reserved category seats,” said a former JEE chairman, commenting on this move.

Moreover, directors have also suggested to carry forward this year’s 66 vacant seats into next admission year.

For those SC/ST students who get admission for the preparation of IIT-Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) will now get more relaxation in the entrance examination of preparatory classes.

The IIT-Directors have also asked the government to add Singapore as the entrance examination centre from the next year. This year, IIT had conducted the entrance examination at 117 cities including Dubai.