Anand Kumar and Super 30

The Hindu has a profile of the man behind Super 30, the Patna residential school that coaches 30 students every year for IIT-JEE. In the context of the proposal to increase the cut-off for board exam marks, he says this about the JEE:

Reacting to Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal's idea of scrapping the IIT entrance examination, he says, “He should rather think of cutting down the lofty standard of questions in the entrance. They are for research scholars, not for class 12 students.” [Bold emphasis added]

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Sometime last year, Al Jazeera did an hour-long story on the Super 30. You can watch the first part here, and select the other parts from the accompanying menu. It weaves the story of this remarkable man, with the journey of a handful of candidates through his rigorous residential program at Super 30 (it even covers the "sting in the tail" that followed the announcement of JEE results in 2008).

Super 30 runs an "entrance exam" to select the students who'll benefit from its residential program. This exam is taken by over 4000 students. In other words, Super 30 is more selective -- it admits less than 1 % of the students taking the exam -- than even the IITs which admit about 2 percent of the JEE takers!