Glitches in online JEE counselling

Rano

VIP
Glitches in online JEE counselling, high rankers fail to get seats in first round

New Delhi, July 7

After facing embarrassment on account of errors in the IIT-JEE question banks for this year, the JEE online counselling system, introduced this year, has now started facing trouble.

News is that several general category candidates, having cracked the exam and scored good all-India ranks (AIRs) in the range of 5000 to 6000 (out of the common merit list comprising over 9000 students) did not get any engineering or science courses allocated in the IITs in the first round of admission; this despite the students having submitted a few hundred course options online.

More worrying is the fact that in the present online counselling system of JEE, candidates are clueless about the cutoff ranks for seats allotted and have no idea about how many ranks they have lost so as to lose placement in a preferred seat. Students would now have to wait until the second round of admission (to be announced in July) to know their actual status.

Due to lack of the said information, these candidates can’t also decide on joining the courses they have been offered through AIEEE or through other admission counsellings, like state boards.

It may be noted that IITs announced online counselling this year and candidates were required to submit preferred course options through the Internet between June 9 and 12.

What happened, however, was disturbing. When the final course allocation was done by IITs on June 28, 16 days after the candidates gave their online choices, a JEE qualified student could not find on the net the status of all other filled seats along with AIRs on which these were filled. The system has naturally left thousands of successful students in confusion.

Online counseling of JEE is a complete rollback of what was practiced until the last year when a student was called to one of the IITs, given a tentative list of vacant seats on his turn so he had a fair idea of what he could expect. The old process was hence transparent to an extent.

Incidentally, although IIT-JEE doesn’t have smart online features in the counselling (other than feeding the course choices online) and have completely black-boxed the system of course allotment, CBSE’s AIEEE offers much better transparency of seat allotment to give the candidate an idea of sliding to be done in the next level of counselling to improve his seat allotment.

In AIEEE counselling, all filled-in seats are shown on the website along with the corresponding ranks and category.

JEE results were announced on May 26 and 13,000 students were declared successful for 9,500 seats in IITs, Institute of Technology, BHU and Indian Institute of Mines, Dhanbad. Out of 13,000 successful students, over 9000 were awarded AIRs and placed in common merit list. However, several students with AIRs as high as in 5000 in the general category haven’t yet secured admissions to IITs despite submitting online course options. In JEE 2010, for each general category seat, 1.4 times the candidates have qualified as against 1.15 last year. That’s another one reason why many general category students, even with good AIRs, may not get any course in IITs.
 
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