Archive for May 2012
Four IIMs among eight in Business Standard’s top B-school bracket
India’s management education fraternity has delivered its judgment on the country’s top business schools. Among the top B-schools in India (mentioned alphabetically here) are the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Indore; Management Development Institute (MDI)at Gurgaon; National Institute of Industrial Engineering in Mumbai; Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar; and XLRI, Jamshedpur.
The BS Best B-School Survey 2012 has been conducted by Business Standard in association with IMRB International, a leading market research agency in India, and the results of the thirteenth survey of B-schools are available in the May 2012 issue of the Indian Management, which is now on stands.
The survey does not aim to rank the institutes, but puts them in 14 hierarchical categories: Super League 1, Super League 2, A1 through A8, and B1 through B4. The scores have been allotted on two broad parameters — audit scores and perception scores. The final score is a weighted aggregate, which has been used to put the institutes in one of the 14 categories that have been worked out.
The survey puts the B-Schools in 14 hierarchical categories. Here are some institutes falling in the top two categories:
Super League 1
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata
Indian Institute of Management, Indore
Management Development Institute, Gurgaon
National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai
Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar
XLRI, Jamshedpur
Super League 2
Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai
Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode
Institute of Management, Nirma University, Ahmedabad
Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad
Institute of Management Technology, Nagpur
International Management Institute, New Delhi
Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai
KJ Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research, Mumbai
SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai
SVKM’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai
The audit module is comprehensive — it takes into account a range of elements such as intellectual capital, infrastructure, admissions and placements, industry interface, governance and the scale of operations, each of which can be measured objectively. The perception scores take into account the viewpoint of the industry and the alumni. This makes the survey of B-schools totally objective, unbiased and transparent, and helps benchmark the management institutes in addition to providing authentic information to all the stakeholders.
The survey is open to business schools all over India. The eligibility criterion is that they should be approved by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) or the government or a university. Also, at least two batches of students should have passed out of the institute. This is to assess the placements that happen at the campus. The questionnaires are sent to all approved B-schools, and they are requested to revert with the completed questionnaires to IMRB. Each completed questionnaire is thoroughly scrutinised for missing and misrepresented data, if any. The data are checked against the previous years’ figures to discover and subsequently validate any major changes. Following this, a query sheet is generated for and cross-checked with each institute, through e-mail, phone or personal visits.
For the latest survey, questionnaires were sent to 2,400 business schools. About 200 schools sent their entries within the time limit. We had to drop a few institutions from the final 197 that appear this year because the data supplied by them were incomplete or there were some unexplained deviation from the data presented last year. We are glad to note there were 63 new entrants in the list this year compared to last year.
Source: Business Standard, May 30, 2012
Indian business schools now attract global faculty
In the first quarter of 2012, Rajib L. Saha left the University of Rochester in the United States to join the International School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, as Assistant Professor in Information Systems. The triggers for relocation were both personal – the alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, can now be closer to his family in West Bengal – and professional. “The structure here allows for a higher level of interaction between the resident faculty and the visiting faculty compared to the US structure. There is a lot of scope to grow by working closely with research and industry than by merely attending conferences” says Saha.
Cut to the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Trichy, where Mouloud Madoun is on the institute’s list of permanent faculty. After teaching at business schools in France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Romania and Poland, Madoun recently packed his bags and headed for India. At IIM, Trichy, the professor teaches Human Resource Management, Organisational Behaviour and Corporate Social Responsibility, among other subjects. “My decision to relocate to India is professional. Although I may have earned four times what I do in India, I am a lot happier here,” says the professor of French origin who taught for two decades at the Marseille School of Business.
Like Saha and Madoun, a number of global faculty members – including some of Indian origin – have figured the grass is greener on Indian B-school campuses. In 2011, Dr. Galit Shmueli, an Israeli-American professor, joined ISB as the Srini Raju Centre for IT and the Networked Economy Chaired Professor of Data Analytics & Associate Professor of Statistics & Information Systems. Her three compelling reasons for relocating: family, contribution to society, and lifestyle.
Other global faculty of Indian origin who joined ISB in 2011 include Siddharth Singh from Rice University, US, Sarang Deo from Kellogg School of Management, US, and Suman Ann Thomas from the National University of Singapore.
ISB, says Sanjay Kallapur, Senior Associate Dean (Faculty Development), targets research-oriented faculty from international schools who are equally keen to join institutes where the research environment and infrastructure are solid. “The pay too has to be competitive and we pay 60% of what US schools offer,” says Kallapur. “We have to compete with Asian B-schools from countries such as China and Singapore where sizeable grants come in from the government, enabling these institutes to offer top dollar to attract international top faculty,” he adds.
If global faculty is willing to take a haircut in pay packets, it’s because they are coming to India with specific mandates and missions. Madoun, for instance, is researching a new management model based on Indian values and culture. “I think the management models in Europe and America are facing a lot of problems. India has the right ingredients to build a sustainable model,” he says.
Similarly, Shmueli is pursuing a “dual life” in Asia. “In one life, I am an active academic, conducting research, teaching on-ground and online, and performing other academic roles. In the second life, I am a social entrepreneur in Bhutan where I co-direct the Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies at the Rigsum Institute of IT & Management.”
For those with roots in India, getting back makes immense sense now that pay parity has narrowed substantially in the past two years. “Indian academics today want to bring up their children in the Indian culture as opposed to a confused desi in the West,” says Dr. Bala Balachandran, founder, Dean & Chairman, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai. Adds S. Bhardwaj, who returned to India from Maryland University, US, way back in 2006: “Many people abroad feel out of place although materially they do well. Although earlier the pay packets were terrible, they have significantly improved in the past few years. The fact is even with relative pay parity, people are happier in India.” Bhardwaj now teaches marketing and consumer behaviour at Great Lakes.
The average annual income of an untenured professor in a top-class B-school in the US is about $150,000; and roughly $400,000 for a tenured and full or chair professor. A fully accomplished, top-of-the-line scholar in India with all the necessary degrees and qualifications heading a top-of-the-line B-school makes roughly about $50,000, or a little over Rs. 2.5 million a year. A few professors who have relocated to India in recent times take home salaries of over Rs. 5.5 million a year, which is 70-80% of what they would have earned in the US and the UK, said the dean of a top B-school on condition of anonymity.
Pay packets are not immaterial, but then those coming to India – particularly those with an ancestral stake in the country – are attracted by other factors, too. Nagesh Rao, who was recently appointed Director of Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA), had worked in different universities in the US for around 23 years before joining the IIM-Ahmedabad, in 2010. “I came back because of professional as well as personal reasons. There is no comparison between pay packages of India and the US, but I did not look at the compensation factor as I wanted to come back to India,” says the professor who has taught at the University of Maryland, Ohio University, and University of New Mexico.
There is a view that India does not need to proactively woo global faculty, and if there is a rush into the country, it’s because of the more attractive prospects here. Debashis Chatterjee, Director, IIM-Kozhikode, says he gets a lot of applications from the UK from faculty keen to relocate to India. “There is no need to chase global faculty; the knowledge creation is happening here and they (overseas professors) are as keen to be a part of it. If research wasn’t happening here, why would a Harvard want to set up a research base in India?”
Source: The Economic Times, May 30, 2012
Independent body to regulate vocational education sector
The gov
ernment has decided to establish an independent body to regulate and lay down guidelines for developing vocational education in the country. This is expected to end a tussle between the Ministries of Labour and Human Resource Development over control of the government’s plan to impart training to 500 million people on key disciplines, including in auto and textiles.
The National Skill Development Authority (NSDA) is likely to be headed by either the Prime Minister’s skills adviser and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd’s Vice-Chairman S. Ramadorai or Planning Commission member Narendra Jhadav, according to government officials who declined to be named.
NSDA will prepare a national skills qualification framework instead of a vocational qualification framework as was suggested by the labour ministry or a national vocational education qualification framework as was proposed by the MHRD. “This has been decided by the central government a few days back. We don’t have any issue with MHRD (now) and the new framework will take care of the skills education sector in the country,” said labour secretary Mrutyunjay Sarangi.
A row broke out between the ministries of labour and HRD over the latter’s attempt to lay down a framework for vocational education. The labour ministry, the nodal agency for vocational education, strongly opposed the HRD ministry’s interference, Mint reported on 14October. The MHRD said the labour ministry had failed to meet the rising need for skilled manpower, creating a need for it to step in and integrate skills training with mainstream education.
The Ministry of Labour has a mandate to create a pool of 100 million skilled workers by 2022, as part of an overall target of training 500 million workers. The Ministry of Labour supervises more than 9,000 industrial training institutes (ITIs) and industrial training centres, where at least 1.2 million students are enrolled.
A MHRD ministry official, requesting anonymity, said the ministry recently had meetings with the labour ministry to iron out differences. Sharda Prasad, Director General at the Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGET), confirmed the development. “I had two rounds of meeting with higher education secretary and other officials. Few days back, secretaries of several ministries had a meeting on the issue,” Prasad said, adding that both the ministries will collaborate for the national mission. DGET functions under the labour ministry.
“It’s a positive development that the issue has been resolved. This will pave way for training more people in the country,” said Dillip Chenoy, managing director of National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), a public-private partnership between the government and industry lobby groups. NSDC has a mandate to provide vocational training to 150 million people by 2022.
Meanwhile, the European Union and India on Wednesday launched a project on skill development that will support development of the national skills qualification framework in some segments, including the automotive sector, with a focus on manufacturing and maintenance. It will receive an assistance of €6 million from the EU. Joao Cravinho, the EU’s envoy to India, said that in a decade the South Asian nation will have a surplus of 56 million workforce as against a shortage of 47 million in Western countries. This project will cater to the global market and help mobility of labour force “for the ever-changing employment market”, he said.
Source: Mint, May 24, 2012
Gaming tech helps students score better
Eight-year-old Ashish Gupta, a third standard student, could never really understand what a fraction was. His mother asked him to play an online game on a site recommended by her friends on Facebook. Ashish, who logged on to www.classtopper.com, got a screen similar to the online game sites he visits and started working on a fraction game. A circle cut into half, with one portion painted green, appeared and he was asked what fraction of the circle was coloured. Confused as he was, he clicked on the wrong answer.
Gamification, or using gaming techniques to explain concepts, is a happening trend among Indian students these days. It has been identified as among the Top-10 technology trends for 2012 by audit and consultancy firm Deloitte. Classtopper.com, for one, has over 10,000 users logging in just a month after its launch in India. With digital games generating over $25 billion in sales worldwide in 2010, online content providers are wrapping educational material in the form of games so that students can learn, while having fun.
While some people dismiss gamification as a fad, neuroscientists are discovering more and more ways in which humans react to interactive design elements. They say such elements can trigger feel-good chemical reactions from human responses to a stimuli — increasing the reaction time, states the study ‘Future of Internet’ by Pew Research Centre.
Last week, two IIT-Mumbai alumni, Ashish Rangnekar and Ujjwal Gupta — co-founders of BenchPrep — brought out the first game-based GRE test preparation app for iPad, called GRE Score Quest, which can be downloaded free from App Store. “As a student attempts a question, we tell them how many of their friends have got the same answer correct. We also compare the student’s performance with their peers around the world. These elements are similar to what you see in Angry Birds in Facebook,” says Rangnekar. “We create games using the educational content developed by publishers like McGraw Hill. For example, if a mathematics chapter has a long list of theorems, we create a match-the-column game,” says Rangnekar.
Complex algorithms deployed in game-based platforms were traditionally used by high skill-assessment programmes like GREs. “Students who appear for GRE examinations have to go through different levels. Depending on how he/she scores in the first section, the complexity of the next section is determined,” says Rochelle, explaining the new format, which was introduced in August 2011 by Educational Testing Service (ETS), the organisation which conducts GRE tests globally.
The difference now is that these algorithms are now designed for students to be used anywhere, anytime. Jatin Patel, co-founder and CEO of UK-based www.companyclasstopper.com, says: “The gamebased software operates on the concept that each learner is different. The software throws up questions in three different ways. Only if the students get it right, ca
n he/she proceed to the next level. There are 35 different analytical tools which track a student’s progress”.
In what’s still a disruptive space with no visible competition, www.classtopper.com hopes to tap the Indian market with its 75,000 private schools and 90 million students. The company is in talks with Google Ventures for private equity (PE) funding. While those who can afford smartphones, tablets or PCs can play games online, students of Municipal Corporation Schools in Mumbai are being initiated to these fun learning processes.
In March 2012, some students of Mumbai’s ‘City of Los Angeles School’ in Mahim were asked to stay back after their examinations to carry out a pilot on online educational videos from Khan Academy, which creates educational videos for students. “Students were shown videos of subjects they learnt and then made to answer a set of game-puzzles,” says Miheer R Walavalkar, Country Director, India of Teach-A Class. This was facilitated by creating an ‘Internet hotspot’ in the school.
“A hotspot is created by converting one of the computers into a server and connecting rest of the computers to it,” explains Walavalkar. Unlike the classtopper. com play pattern where the software adjusts automatically, here students are offered fun-based questions designed from a base level and then gradually increased in complexity. “There was a scramble among students to step up their scores and they prepared to work on this for hours together,” says Miheer. The next pilot is going to be held at Geeta Vikas schoo in Mumbai. Meanwhile, students of high-end schools like RN Podar School in Mumbai have been using videos from Khan Academy as part of their learning curriculum.
“Teachers only give them the links to the videos. Students are asked to watch the videos at home and a discussion on this is held the next day,” says the principal of the school, Avnita Bir, who stumbled on this site while going through Facebook. “There have been 200,000 visitors from India to Khan Academy sites,” says Sundar Subbarayan, School Implementations Lead, Khan Academy. Most of the downloads were from Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, in April.
Source: The Economic Times, May 24, 2012
IITs pitch for subjective JEE to improve student quality
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are planning to switch to a subjective question-based test from the current multiple-choice-based joint entrance examination (JEE) after criticism over the deteriorating quality of students. The new test will seek to evaluate the knowledge and analytical ability of aspiring students. Critics of the current format, which comprises two multiple-choice papers, include Infosys Ltd Chairman Emeritus N.R. Narayana Murthy and other executives and alumni.
The move is also being seen by some academicians as a compromise between the government and the IITs over a common entrance exam for all engineering schools. The government wants to conduct a nationwide objective-type selection test for millions of students aspiring for such colleges, including the IITs. The IITs themselves now favour a two-tier selection process, where the top rank holders in the objective test will be eligible to appear for a final subjective question-based evaluation.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has been informed about the proposal to change the selection process by the senates of at least the five older IITs. The senate is the highest decision-making body at an IIT and comprises senior professors, the director and some outside experts, including former students and executives. “Selecting students through an objective test is not the best way to get quality students for institutes like IITs,” said Sanjeev Sanghi, president of the IIT Delhi faculty forum. “We need to go back to the subjective format.”
Murthy said at an IIT alumni meet in New York in October last year that JEE coaching centres had led to the deteriorating quality of students entering the colleges. “But their performance in IITs, at jobs or when they come for higher education in institutes in the US is not as good as it used to be,” he said. “This has to be corrected. A new method of selection of students to IITs has to be arrived at.” While the top 20% of IITians can “stand among the best anywhere in the world”, the quality of the remaining 80% wasn’t as sound, Murthy had said.
Pramod Maheshwari, chief executive of Career Point, an education company that prepares students for the JEE examination, said it wasn’t fair to blame the coaching institutes. “They should ask why students go for coaching in the first place,” said Maheshwari, himself an IIT alumnus. “The quality of questions when we gave JEE (in 1989) was much tougher than what it is today.”
But Maheshwari said the suggested change would be a good move. “If you make the entrance subjective, it will help for sure,” he said. On the other hand, Maheshwari suggests that blaming the coaching centres is to ignore other ills in the system. “The standard of many IIT faculties is not very good and they need to do self-audit without blaming coaching centres, who have no say on the entrance,” he said.
The IITs insist though that changing the entrance format will have a significant impact on student quality. The decline in quality is linked to the switch in the format to objective-type questions in 2005-06, said a senior IIT Bombay professor who didn’t want to be named. Coaching centres’ methods are geared towards helping students spot the right answer out of multiple choices, allowing the undeserving to do better than more gifted aspirants with higher powers of understanding, he added. The IITs seem to regard the coaching centres with some amount of distrust, even going to the extent of scrapping the JEE centre at Kota, Rajasthan, although it isn’t clear why exactly this had been done. The town is reputed as a hub for coaching centres.
In the new format being proposed by the IITs, the top 50,000 performers will be culled from the applicants that sit in the initial multiple-choice test. Those selected will be subjected to an in-depth, three-paper evaluation, according to IIT professors who declined to be named. “Mathematics, chemistry and physics need to be tested in three different papers, maybe over two days. Papers will be checked manually by senior professors of the older IITs to create the rankings,” said an IIT Delhi professor. A senior IIT Kanpur professor confirmed this. Both declined to be named.
The JEE is currently the common admission test for the 15 IITs, the Indian School of Mines (ISM) at Dhanbad and the Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University, which jointly admit at least 9,600 students every year. This year, 480,000 appeared for the JEE.
An IIT-Bombay senate member expressed resistance to the MHRD’s proposal for a common entrance examination for all engineering schools starting next year. “We want a thorough trial in 2013 and then go for it in 2014. (But) the common entrance (exam) should not be the sole basis for the IIT selection process,” he said. Himangshu R. Vaish, a former president of the IIT Delhi Alumni Association and managing director of Instapower Ltd, told Mint last month that it would be preferable to have a subjective JEE exam. The ministry’s common entrance may affect the IIT brand, he said.
The IIT council and the ministry plan to hold a meeting on the issue on 28 May, said M. Anandakrishnan, Chairman of IIT Kanpur. “We will resolve all issues on that day,” he said.
Source: Mint, May 23, 2012
More companies to hire fresh MBAs and accounting graduates this year: GMAC
More companies are looking to hire fresh MBA and master of accounting graduates in 2012 than they did last year, according to the 2012 Global Management Education Graduate survey by Graduate Management Admission Council ( GMAC). Nearly 79% of the companies say they plan to hire recent MBA graduates this year, compared with 72% last year. On an average, the companies expect the number of new hires to increase to 17 per firm in 2012 from 13 per firm in 2011.
The Global Management Education Graduate survey for mid-February to mid-March 2012 is drawn from a sample size of 1,096 recruiters, 128 business schools and 800 companies the world over. Airtel India, India Infoline, ISB-Hyderabad, IIFT, Delhi and SP Jain Institute of Management Research were the Indian companies and business schools participating in the survey.
Companies with fewer than a 1,000 employees accounted for the largest proportional increase in demand for MBAs and other specialised business graduates in the survey. Around 62% of the newly-minted MBAs and other management education graduates participating in the survey had a job offer, up from 54% in 2011.
The survey states that MBA graduates will continue to command higher salaries this year compared with the bachelors graduates in the US. The median salary for MBA hires in the US is $90,000, but four out of five industries with available data reported a median salary greater than that amount.
Source: The Economic Times, May 22, 2012
States may get direct central funding for higher education
With bulk of enrollment in higher and technical education taking place in universities and colleges supported by the states, the government is planning to fund the states directly, instead of allocating money to individual institutes. Both the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and the Planning Commission are mulling new ways of funding the state-run institutes — which often complain of paucity of funds.
Currently, the Centre funds the state-run institutes individually through the University Grants Commission (UGC) in stages, but under the new system, states would be funded as a whole. The new system aims to increase the funding to state universities and colleges from Rs. 7,600 crore (Rs. 76 billion) in the 11th Five Year Plan to more than Rs. 25,000 crore (Rs. 250 billion) in the 12th Five Year Plan period (2012-17).
“There is a consensus that state universities and colleges get little support from the Centre. We are mulling a model wherein states will be looked at as a collection of institutions — both state universities and colleges — compared with the present system, wherein UGC gives piecemeal funding to institutions case by case. We are also thinking that allocation for each university should be specified at once,” said a Planning Commission official. In fact, the MHRD has proposed norms-based funding of UGC schemes so that there is better coordination between the commission and states.
At present, the higher education system in India comprises more than 556 universities, including 43 central, 289 state, 73 private, 130 deemed-to-be universities and close to 31,324 colleges. Around 14.6 million students are enrolled in the higher education sector and an additional capacity of about 25 million seats would be required over the next decade to cater to the increased demand.
Till sometime back, of the total colleges under the UGC purview, only about 6,000 (less than half) were recognised, making them eligible for development grants from the UGC. The rest were not recognised as they did not meet the criteria of permanent affiliation. In 2007, only 167 out of 224 state universities were recognised while the rest are not able to quality for recognition under this section for they fail to meet the minimum prescribed academic requirements and, thus, are deprived of the development assistance from the UGC.
“More than 80% of the enrolments in higher education happen in state universities, which have funds enough to give salaries to their staff, but hardly for expansion. Under the new scheme, the ministry would pay greater attention to such institutes,” said an education expert from the industry. The planning commission official added that with the change in pattern of funding, the UGC’s role in monitoring the expansion of education in states would increase.
Source: The Financial Express, May 21, 2012
Physios want council on lines of Medical Council of India
The Indian Association of Physiotherapists (IAP) has reiterated its demand for the formation of an independent central physiotherapy council on the lines of Medical Council of India (MCI) and Dental Council of India (DCI). According to the IAP, in the absence of a regulatory body, there is no check of quality of education provided to the students aspiring to join the profession and there is crisis of jobs as well.
“Out of 250 colleges that offer physiotherapy course in India, about 100 have been closed down in the last five years due to lack of opportunities. In Delhi, four colleges have shut down the physiotherapy department recently because number of students seeking to take admission in the course remained low,” said Koshy K Mathai, executive member, IAP. He said physiotherapists have been demanding for a council for the last 20 years. “In government hospitals, there are very few posts for physiotherapists and private sector does not pay well, said a physiotherapist who works at Lok Nayak hospital.
Source: The Times of India, May 21, 2012
IIT-JEE 2012: Number of girls cracking exam doubles in a year, gender imbalance remains intact
Each year boys max out seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). But the count of girls who secured JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) ranks has doubled to 2,886 since the last edition of the exam. Yet, the tech schools will on another front continue to be an unequal world: students from the IIT-Bombay zone (home to Kota) dominate the list of selected candidates. But the southern zone has bagged the credit for having eight of the top 20 rankers, most from Andhra Pradesh.
B-town boys have bagged the top ranks: Faridabad’s Arpit Agrawal topped the JEE with a score of 385 (out of 401); he is followed by Chandigarh’s Bijoy Singh Kochar and Bhilai’s Nishanth Koushik. Priya Inala — all-India rank (AIR) 21 — from AP is the girls’ topper. Science is this Asian Physics Olympiad gold medallist’s first love. She is joined by two other girls in the top 100. This year, 150,000 girls took the JEE free of cost. Clearly, the plan to not charge them worked: the headcount of successful girls is exactly double of last year’s 1,443.
Three boys tied at the score of 369: Jaipur’s Nishit Agrawal (AIR 6; Bombay zone topper), Anant Gupta (AIR 7; Roorkee zone) and Kandivli’s Manik Dhar (AIR 8; Maharashtra topper). Competition was compounded by the fact that JEE 2012 was tougher than its predecessor. “The cut-off has dropped to 172. Last time, it was 229. The difficulty level has indeed gone up,” said Avinash Mahajan, IIT-Bombay’s JEE chairman.
An analysis of the top 100 students shows that 31 hail from the western zone and 38 from the Madras zone. The Bombay zone also has the highest number of candidates in the top 1,000–294. Of all the seven zones (prepared on the basis of the old IITs), the western region saw the largest pool of students who qualified— 4,239. Of these, 491 are girls. As many as 73,351 candidates took the test from this zone.
The Madras zone, from where 71,981 candidates sat for the JEE, will send 3,666 candidates to the 15 tech schools. Closer home, only 599 of the 4,696 students who sat for JEE from Mumbai qualified; of the 22,331 who appeared for the exam from Maharashtra, 1,796 made it.
Out of 33,057 candidates from Jaipur, many of whom prepared from coaching centres in Kota, 2,677 made the cut. A total of 470,000 candidates appeared for JEE. Of them, 17,462 have been short-listed for the counselling process for admission to the IITs. But 24,112 have secured ranks and can join other colleges that accept JEE scores.
JEE chairman G D Reddy said that across India, the report card of reserved category students had improved. “There will not be any preparatory programme for SC/ST students this year. Only 124 students from the physically challenged category have been short-listed for the preparatory programme.”
Of the 4,805 OBC candidates who qualified, 1,625 made it to the common merit list. Of the 3,464 SC and 654 ST students who qualified, about 300 made it without the handicap of score relaxation. Nishanth Rumandla (AIR 4) is the OBC topper; Zubin Arya (AIR 94) came first on the SC merit list; and Vikas Meena (AIR 642) topped the ST merit list.
In all, the 15 IITs, IT-BHU and ISM, Dhanbad, have 9,647 seats, apportioned as: 4,722 for the general category, 2,101 for OBCs, 434 for minority OBCs, 1,403 for SCs, 708 for STs and 279 for physically challenged students.
Source: The Times of India, May 19, 2012
IIT-JEE results out, 27% more students shortlisted this year
The wait by 470,000 students was finally over on Friday, when the Indian Institute of Technology — Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) results for 2012 were declared. Arpit Aggarwal, a student of Faridabad’s Modern Vidya Niketan, bagged rank one, while Bijoy Singh Kochar from Chandigarh came in second and Nishanth N Koushik from Bhilai was awarded the third rank.
This year, the IITs shortlisted 17,462 students — a major increase from last year’s 13,800 students. These students, who will be gunning for the 15 IITs in the country, will now have to register online for counselling.
“Since counselling will be done online, we opened counselling registration on Friday. Students must fill in and submit the fee challan latest by June 9 because we will close counselling entries on June 10,” said GB Reddy, Chairman, IIT-JEE 2012.
Counselling, however, will not necessarily translate into a secured seat in the IITs for the aspirants. “We have shortlisted twice the number of students as compared to the number of seats. So, there is no guarantee that a student who has got a rank will also get a seat,” Reddy added.
This year the IITs have rolled out several changes in not just the application process, but also the number of seats. The criterion for withdrawal of admission has undergone a sea change. The IITs also uploaded the answer key to the IIT-JEE — a move that was welcomed by aspirants.
Now, several IITs have increased the number of seats across several courses. “There have been some changes in the number of seats at some IITs. While IITs Dhanbad and Hyderabad have increased the number of seats, IIT Roorkee has rearranged its number of seats,” he said. This time students who withdrew admission after payment of fees can appear for the exam again in 2013.
Source: Hindustan Times, May 19, 2012
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