A preliminary report is here (and here, too). Here are the salient details:
Over 240,000 candidates took the exam, and "7,209 (almost 3 percent) are eligible to seek admission to 5,537 seats" in the seven IITs, IT-BHU and ISMU-Dhanbad.
Among the candidates, some 54,000 (about 22 percent) were women. The topper among women is ranked at 55. In all, there are 587 women in the much coveted JEE list this year, 193 more than in 2006. Their fraction in the 2007 cohort works out to 8.1 percent.
[In comparison, the fraction of women was 6.3 percent (321 / 5092) in 2005, and 6.2 percent (394 / 6343) in 2006. So, women have done better this year by a considerable margin.]
The IITs also have some statistics about Dalit (SC) and Tribal (ST) students. Of 20,892 Dalit students wrote the exam, and nearly 594 (2.8 percent) of them qualified. These numbers for tribal students are, respectively, 5,909 and 109 (2 percent).
If you look at these numbers, pass-through rate is roughly the same for Dalit (2.8 percent) and open category students (3 percent). For the tribals (2 percent), it's about a third less. However, the real hit for SC and ST students is on the input side: Dalits form only 8.5 percent of the exam takers, while 15 percent of the seats are reserved for them. Similarly, only 2.5 percent of the exam takers belong to STs, against the 7.5 percent quota meant for them.
[Update: I wanted to add this, but missed doing it. Women get hit on both the input side and the pass-through side. With 22 percent of the exam-takers, women are poorly represented at this stage itself. They then suffer a second level disadvantage, with just about 1.1 percent of them getting into the JEE list. In other words, men are over three times more likely than women to get through JEE. ]
There is no separate quota for OBCs this year. However, the IITs have not revealed how many of the JEE-qualified candidates belong to the OBCs. They certainly collected the data this year, so I'm sure they know what that number is. I'm surprised this information has not been revealed at the news conference in Mumbai. I would think this is a fit case for invoking the Right to Information Act.
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More when additional details emerge. In the meantime, you might want to look at an analysis of the 2006 JEE results, or our recent discussion of JEE's (plausible) bias against women, recapped here.
5 Comments:
In other words, men are over three times more likely than women to get through JEE.
A very strange statement professor. Actually men are over three times more likely to go to an IIT but among those who take JEE, women are about three times more likely to qualify the exam.
Do the math again. Please. You will see that the quoted statement ("... men are over three times more likely than women to get through JEE.") is right.
Corollary: The brightest men take IIT entrance exams while tbe brightest women do other things; like what? Literature? Politics? Chemistry perhaps?
Sir,
I wished to point out what I consider a small flaw in your arguments leading to the conlusion that JEE is probably biased against women students.
In your analysis, you have used the average pass percentages to derive the conclusion that girls fare better. However many factors might contribute to this: a
very sad one is that there are fewer young women than men in the "under privileged" areas who take these exams, which might show up as there average result being better. My experience has been (again this is empirical) that there is almost no difference in the average boy and the average girl if they are reared in the same socio-economic conditions.
Also, these results pertain to around 50
lakh students.(The board exams in Up are taken by around 20 lakh, so I am extrapolating conservatively), while the JEE is taken by only 5 lakh people. So probably the sample which takes the JEE is not a randon sample over this group.
My experience in the IITs has been that
on the average, boys and girls perform almost equally. Assuming the hypothesis that better average performance should be an indicator , one would probably expect girls to fare far better that boys, but as I said, by what I have seen , the performance is nerly equal.
I am just a young student and I realise you are indeed much more knowledgeable and experienced than I am. Please do correct me where you find me wrong
Piyush.
I was shocked to hear from a young chemistry lecturer a few days ago that a number of pure science departments in universities are closing down due to lack of students. In his own university, they only taught organic chemistry and claimed that all quantum mechanics was taught at high school level. Everyone gets admitted to ' engineering schools' thanks to mushrooming of private engineering colleges. He lamented that people who hardly managed a first class in high school were candidates for science studies. So,we have a nation full of engineers, who will teach chemistry and physics in high schools? Are these the people who barely managed to pass the higher secondary exam? I guess it is not relevant for this blog but let's hope there are people who dont pass JEE or even dont get a good mark in higher secondary but will make a good science teacher.
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