MATHS TOUGH, CHEMISTRY EASY

How has the JEE Advanced, arguably the toughest engineering entrance test in the country, changed over the past decade?

- Sheena Sachdeva

The mathematics section of the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced has been getting tougher over the past decade but the 2022 edition was its toughest in a decade - the average percentage of candidates with correct responses was 9.43% for Paper 1 and 10.39% for Paper 2. The cut-off scores for reserved categories rose implying that candidates from the historically-marginalised Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes did better.

The JEE Advanced was conducted by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in August. The entrance test is for admission in undergraduate engineering programmes, mainly at the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). Only candidates whose scores are in the top 2.5 lakh of the national-level Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main are eligible to appear for the JEE Advanced. In 2022, over 1.55 lakh candidates wrote the exam.

The number of B.Tech seats in the IITs has risen 68.12% from 2013 to 2022. Improvement in women's participation is due, at least in part, to the addition of supernumerary seats up to 20% of the total strength in 2018. In 2022, the Joint Admission Board (JAB) of the IITs introduced supernumerary seats for foreign nationals including People of Indian Origin (PIO) and Overseas Citizens of India (OCI).

Counselling for the IITs - the process of assigning a specific seat to a student is conducted by the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JOSAA) and in 2022, it conducted six rounds of counselling at the end of which 16,635 seats were allotted to candidates. This was 37 more than the total capacity across IITs. Nine supernumerary seats were created for candidates from defence services and 66 for foreign nationals at the final round.

The JAB reports on JEE Advanced have changed over the years with some details and categories of data dropped from some reports and others such as the distribution of qualified candidates by their school boards -left out for years.