Single digit cutoffs

In an unforeseen effect of RTI, globally respected IITs have been stuck in a spiral of low cut-offs in their joint entrance examinations (JEE) for the last three years even for general candidates.

Despite all their efforts to pull out of the single-digit cut-offs they had fallen into in 2007 and 2008 (1,4 & 3 and 5,0 & 3 in Maths, Physics and Chemistry, respectively), IITs could improve only marginally this year, as evident from the marks announced earlier this month.

Out of the maximum possible marks of 160 in each subject in 2009, the cut-offs in Maths and Chemistry barely broke into double digits (11 marks each) while it remained a single-digit score in Physics (8 marks).
This is even after IITs abandoned the cut-off formula they had adopted in 2007 and 2008 (20 percentile or the best of the bottom 20 per cent of the candidates) and tried a new one in 2009 (average or mean of the marks of all the candidates).

Such ridiculously low cut-offs have been dogging IITs ever since they found themselves at a loss to explain to the Central Information Commission the basis on which they had arrived at the respectably high cut-offs of 37, 48 and 55 in the 2006 JEE, which was the first to be held after RTI came into force in November 2005.

In their third and latest attempt to explain the 2006 cut-offs, they set up a committee last month consisting of directors of IIT Guwahati and IIT Bombay, Gautam Barua and Dewang Khakhar, to submit a report to the Calcutta high court showing the exact calculations.

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