65,000 students who passed JEE (Main) won't sit for JEE(Advanced)

MUMBAI: Not every engineering aspirant is in thrall of the IITs. The JEE (Advanced) has seen a 30% dropout rate. About 65,000-odd candidates who made the cut in the JEE (Main) did not sign up to cross the second barrier to joining the IITs.

The largest fall has been from the open category candidates. Among them, a little more than 42% of candidates who qualified in the JEE (Main) did not register for the advanced test. The numbers were best for the OBC-NCL (Other Backward Class - non creamy layer) students.

JEE chairman from IIT Kanpur, Prof Shalabh, said the number of registrations were likely to rise a bit as details from various banks would come in a day or two.

Gender-wise, 1.2 lakh boys of the 1.8 lakh who cleared the Main registered for the JEE-A. Of the 50,000 girls, 32,923 will write the IIT entrance on May 20.

Last year too 1.7 lakh students of the 2.2 lakh who qualified in the JEE (main) registered for the second level. The JEE (Advanced) test will be held on May 20. This year the IIT entrance exam will be entirely computer-based.

"The difficulty levels of the JEE Main and Advanced are very different. There may be some candidates who are likely to-based on their scores in the mains-get into an NIT in a stream of their choice or join a top engineering college," said a faculty.

Coaching institutes said that undergraduate engineering at foreign universities was also trending and some students who may have taken the Main as a backup plan would have got into a top university abroad and hence did not sign up for taking the Advanced exam.

This year, the qualifying scores in the Mains were dropped so that more candidates would be eligible for the IIT entrance test. The overall cut-off for all categories slipped considerably, with the common rank list cut-off dropping from 81 to 74. A total of 2.3 lakh candidates qualified for the Advanced exam, including 1.8 lakh boys and 50,000 girls. Last year, around 2.2 lakh students had made the cut for the JEE (A).

Interestingly, of this year's total number of candidates who qualified to take the Advanced exam, 1.1 lakh (48%) were from the general category. A little more than 65,313 (28%) are OBC-NCL and 34,425 (15%) are Scheduled Caste candidates and 17,256 (7.5%) are Scheduled Tribe candidates.