JEE Advanced Cut Off Lowest In Recent Years, Here’s Why

The general category students qualified the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced by securing a minimum of 69 marks out of 396. Those falling in the economically weaker sections (EWS) in the general category and the other backward classes (OBC) qualified the entrance test by scoring a minimum of 62 marks. Students belonging to scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribe (ST), and persons with disability (PWD) made it to the list of successful candidates in the test by securing a minimum of 34 marks.

The JEE Advanced cut off remained lowest in recent years. The result of the nationwide entrance test was announced by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi on Monday.

“It's because the questions were tougher this time,” Siddharth Pandey, a faculty member of the IIT Delhi and organizing chairman of the JEE Advanced 2020, told Outlook when asked as to why cut off was significantly lower this year.

A 10 per cent increase in the number of seats each for the EWS-General category students and women students were the other reasons to lower the cut-off.

“Besides, we had instructions from the (Union education) ministry that we have to have twice the number of candidates in each category in the list of qualified. In order to conform to that, we look at the cut off and lower them accordingly,” Pandey added.

In 2019, the JEE Advanced cut-off was a minimum of 93 marks (25 per cent) out of 372 for general category students, 83 each for EWS-General, and OBC (non-creamy layer) students, and 46 each for the SC, ST, and OBC candidates.

The cut-off for the general category students was a minimum of 90 out of 360 marks in 2018, OBC 81, and SC/ST/PWD candidates 45.

A total of 43,204 students qualified JEE-Advanced 2020. Of them, a total of 6,707 students are girls. Over 1.50 lakh candidates had appeared for the nationwide test conducted on September 27.

Pune’s Chirag Falor topped the entrance test by scoring 352 out of 396. Gangula Bhuvan Reddy from Vijayawada grabbed the second position in the all India merit list and Vaibhav Raj, who hails from Begusarai, Bihar, secured the third spot.

Kanishka Mittal from Uttar Pradesh, who secured 17th position in the all India merit list topped among the girls.

The highest number of students who figured in the top 500 list of candidates were from those who appeared for the test from the IIT Madras zone, followed by those from the IIT Delhi zone and IIT Bombay zone. As many as 140 candidates from IIT Madras Zone figured in the top 500 list, 110 from IIT Delhi zone, and 104 from the IIT Bombay zone.

The Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSSA) is expected to begin the admission process from October 6 for filling up a total of 16,053 seats available in the 23 IITs.