2008 JEE results

The results of JEE-2008 were announced yesterday. Here are a few key points (comparisons with the 2007 results use data from my posts from last year):

• The Big Picture: 311,258 students took the exam; 8,652 have got a JEE rank, representing a 'strike rate' of 2.8 percent. Last year, over 243,029 students competed for 7209 ranks, with a strike rate of almost 3 percent.

  Thus, ranks have seen a 20 percent hike (8652 vs. 7209), while the number of seats at the IITs and their associates (IT-BHU, ISM-Dhanbad) is up by 24 percent (6872 vs 5537).

  The 24 percent increase in IIT seats is due to both the first phase of OBC reservation in the existing IITs and their associates, and the full 27 percent OBC reservation in the six new IITs (AP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Orissa and Punjab).

• Women: Over 78,000 women took the JEE this year, about 44 percent increase over last year, and 840 of them got a rank, representing an increase of 43 percent.

  Here's a different way of looking at women's performance. Among the exam takers, women formed nearly 26 percent this year, while they formed 22 percent last year.

  Among the rank-holders, women form 9.7 percent this year; last year, they formed 8.1 percent.

  Finally, here's the most dramatic metric for the kind of advantage men enjoy in in JEE: they are over three times (3.1 times, to be more precise) as likely as women to get through JEE. This advantage is the same (3.2 times) as it was last year.

  The top ranker among women had a JEE rank of 14 this year (N. Vasuki of Bangalore, who also topped the Karnataka CET), a considerable improvement over last year's 55th rank scored by Ankita Sharma of Mumbai.

  [A quick aside: It turns out that Vasuki is from SRN Adarsh College, whose Principal, Prof. Sukanya Chattopadhyay, happens to be a good friend of ours! This must be a proud moment for Sukanya and her colleagues. Another noteworthy fact is that it's not a CBSE school; it belongs to the Karnataka Pre-University Board.]

• Scheduled Castes and Tribes: SC and ST students. Out of 28,393 SC candidates (36 percent over last year's 20892), 690 qualified (16 percent over last year's 594). In terms of success ratio, this year's 2.4 percent is lower than last year's 2.8 percent.

  For the ST candidates, the figures are: 8,514 took the exam (44 % increase over 5,909 last year), and 159 cleared (46 percent increase over 109). Success ratio is about 1.9 percent, roughly the same as last year.

• Other Backward Classes: Out of 72,116 OBC candidates (up 58 % from last year's 45,576), 1,134 have qualified (up 15 % from 990). They formed 23 percent of the exam takers, but were only 13 percent among the rank-holders.

  Last year, there was no reservation for OBC students; since IITs had collected the data, they released it. However, this year, there is some reservation, which implies that OBC students would have benefited from some relaxation in the cut-offs. Thus, in spite of this benefit, the strike rate for OBC students this year (1.6 percent) is lower than that for last year (2.1 percent).

IITs have not released more fine grained data. In particular, it would be great to have disaggregated data for men and women in general as well as in OBC, SC and ST categories. Further, IITs relax the cut-off marks for students in the reserved categories. Thus, if they release data separately for the numbers of OBC men and women, SC men and women, ST men and women, and general category women who make it through the general category cut-off, we'll have a clearer and more realistic idea of the extent of the respective gaps that exist. [What would be even better is the distribution of ranks -- and even better, distribution of marks -- for all these eight categories!]

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An interesting thing you notice when you check Google News for JEE results is the number of newspaper stories celebrating JEE rank-holders (and not just the top rankers) from their cities and towns. While some are just interesting, quite a few are so heart-warming.