Patna: The crusade to cleanse the IIT-JEE admission procedure, which got underway following the startling finding obtained through the Right to Information (RTI) and insightful analyses by Prof. Rajiv Kumar of IIT Kharagpur, is gaining momentum. Now many more joined it are sending their feedbacks to the committee set up by the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) to carry out major reforms.
According to sources, a lot many change, especially with regard to the cut-offs and publication of the Extended Merit List. Prof. Kumar recently wrote a detailed letter – citing specific instances and the flawed mechanism to IIT Visitor, Members of Parliamentary Standing Committee on HRD, IIT faculty, alumni administrators and many others. Kumar, who was given the Best (runner-up) RTI Citizen Award 2009 for his disclosures about the JEE under the RTI Act, wants his campaign to reach the logical conclusion.
“Why did IITs shred the 2006 scripts in haste, whereby it is alleged that Optical Response Sheets (ORS)/marks were tampered to help some faculty wards who scored amazingly high marks?” he asks in his letter. Kumar says it is only because of a few persons holding key positions related to JEE that the procedures of one of the world’s premier institutions have come under a cloud. They must be identified to set things right. A majority of the faculty members also want things to be more transparent,” he maintains.
A report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee of MHRD, which was tabled in Parliament on November 16, 2009, also echoed similar views. “The committee strongly feels that the unequivocal declaration made by a candidate/parent does not mean that the entire examination procedure is foolproof,” it said. According to Kumar, until the revelations surfaced, IIT-JEE was treated as the best managed examination of the country in spite of its never being subjected to any scrutiny. “Now that it has happened, the examination needs to be reformed and strengthened with transparency and accountability,” he says in his proposals submitted to MHRD and IITs.
His simple question is: “Can selection decisions be so ad-hoc as to completely ignore merit and performance? After 2006, when the cut-offs, as calculated by the procedure and affirmed by IIT in an affidavit in the Calcutta High Court, came to meager 7, 4, 6 for Maths, Physics and Chemistry, they fell further to amazingly low levels in subsequent JEEs, which is against the basic policy for IIT selections,” says the argument.
Citing the 2006 results, Kumar highlights how some VVIP wards allegedly benefited from high scores in Chemistry, which had a definite pattern. Four of them scored 135, 130, 125 and 120 in Chemistry, the marks considered very high in the subject. Three of them were in the list of top 100 Chemistry scores. Such high scores with a peculiar pattern in successive multiples of five coupled with the shredding of the scripts in undue haste indicate there was possible tampering to benefit high-profile faculty wards,” he says in his paper.
In his proposal, he has advocated amendment to the candidates’ declaration in the application form, so that they could have the right to challenge irregularities, with a disclaimer that it would not affect his candidature.
IIT – JEE Muddle
Patna: Had the procedure for selection adopted at the IIT-JEE not directly affected the son of an IIT professor, perhaps IIT-JEE ‘expose’ would not have resulted. Rajeev Kumar, Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, was prompted to delve into the IIT-JEE selection procedure after his son failed to make it despite aggregating 231 marks, while others got through with a much lower aggregate of just 154.
“What I found was an eye-opener,” said the professor from Kharagpur in a detailed analysis of the results that is circulating on the web these days. “It took me nearly four years and 20 hearings at the Central Information Commission (CIC) to get this far. But unfortunately, none of the orders have so far been complied with. I have made a presentation before the Union Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal as well as highlight the discrepancies,” he added.
Kumar said he had approached all directors of the IIT board as well as the chairman soon after the 2006 IIT-JEE results were out, but got the same stock reply that nothing could be done. “The entire procedure was under wraps. Thanks to RTI and the subsequent pressure, it was for the first time in 2006 that IIT started issuing marksheets to all students,” he added.
But it ws not easy, as information was hard to come by. “Though I am myself at IIT, I had to use RTI to collect data. Later, I analysed them. I am not associated with IIT-JEE in nay way. What I ma doing dos not relate to my official work. It is also not my son’s cause that I am championing It is much larger cause as getting into IIT happens to be the dream of Indian youth,” he said.
Kumar emphasized that the system of cutoffs is quite arbitrary and often hurts talented students. There may not be bungling, but the procedure is wrong,” he said, adding in JEEs, from 2007 to 2009, it was revealed through RTI that candidates with as low as five percent marks in one of the subjects got through, while others were rejected despite scoring as high as 29% in one subject.
“How would you rate the performance if a candidate aggregates 279 (Math-36, Physics-116 and Chemistry-127) or 251 (Math-101, Phys-96 and Chem-54) or 238 (Math-91, Phy-94 and Chem-53)? Brilliant, when the cut-off for IIT-JEE has been known to be much lwer! And it is really so. But all the above candidates failed to make it to the coveted institutions,” he said.
“On the other hand, those who made it had far lower aggregate of 154 (Math-37, Phy-48 and Chem-69), 156 (Math-45, Phy-56 and Chem-55) and 156 (Math-45, Phy-56 and Chem-55). These are not isolated cases. I have the statistics that candidates scoring 10, 11, 12 or 14 marks in one paper got through,” he said.
Kumar said the disclosure of question papers and model answers also revealed that there were serious evaluation errors in questions as well. “Some questions were directly picked form out-of-syllabi undergraduate (UG)-level books. The Chemistry paper of 2006 has 11 marks of questions wrongly evaluated and 12 marks of questions directly picked from UG standard books,” he said.
Incidentally, this was the issue Anand Kumar of Super 30 had raised during his meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently that the examination pattern fro IIT-JEE should be of Plus Two level, with emphasis on conceptual types. The IIT professor said out-of-syllabi questions were indirectly helping in the mushroom growth of coaching institutes.
Kumar said he had collected such information through RTI that suggests “all is not well with IIT-JEE. What is needed greater transparency and minor changes to fine-tune the system so that the merit and performance are not ignored to make room for far inferior candidates. In the time of RTI Act, nothing should remain under wraps,” he said.
The entire “expose” is now circulating in the IITs as well as outside through internet and has also reached the top echelons of power.
ORS tampered to favor wards of faculty members
Patna: The startling ‘expose’ about the anomalies in the IIT-JEE process with the help of the Right To Information (RTI) Act by IIT Kharagpur Professor Rajiv Kumar has also brought to light the alleged tampering of the Optical Response Sheet (ORS) used in the examination to suit wards of some faculty members.
According to him, JEE must have additional safeguards to prevent tampering. “Allow filling of ORS to be done by pen (as in AIEEE), provide a carbon copy of ORS and make ORS open at the time of declaration of results to pre-empt any possibility of foul play so that a genuine student is not robbed of his deserved berth in IIT,” he suggests.
This was also highlighted in his detailed presentation before the Union Minister of Human Resources Development Kapil Sibal. Some major deficiencies in the system were pointed put in the presentation and several major reforms suggested to ensure a level-playing filed for all bright students. “After all, how do sons and daughter of some select IIT professors always get selected?” he asks.
Kumar’s bold initiative has now taken the form of a countrywide movement even as the MHRD committee, under the chairmanship of IIT Kharagpur Director Damodar Acharya, works on some major reforms. According to sources, Kumar, in his power-point presentation, also underlined how wards of some faculty members were found to have scored high marks, hinting at the possibility of tampering.
Through RTI, Kumar got personal details of candidates who had got selected. They included sons of senior IIT professors, who were involved in the examination process. This brought to light the arbitrary “cut-off” system his son also became a victim of in 2006.
“Strangely, the entire JEE procedure was so tight that nobody could get hang of the yardsticks employed.: he says, adding though he was prompted to go into it because of his son, who is now studying at Jadavpur University, what he discovered would be shattering to many other students much more deserving then his son.
“Students have a right to know the cut-off procedure and selection criteria before they appear at the examination,” he says. It was thanks to his initiative that the institutions now declare the procedure on the website before the examination. “Still, why do IITs not give out solutions when the same is available at the websites of popular coaching institutes?” he asked.
The presentation also questioned the pattern of JEE. “It indirectly promotes coaching, as they train on complex questions, from undergraduate books,” it says, highlighting how the mushrooming institutes cash on in on the Extended Merit List (EML) – something which was everyone to see in Bihar last year when the claims overshot the actual results for Guwahati region by a huge margin. Anand Kumar of Super 30 also raised the issue in his recent meeting with the Prime Minister.
The professor requested the HRD minister for a white paper on the whole affair and thorough investigation. “Executives must be given an exemplary lesson that delays cannot be forever. Reforms may kindly be implemented to strengthen JEE with transparency and accountability,” says the professor, who has been tirelessly pursuing the matter.
However, he fears if the reforms are not effected, his younger daughter might, also have to pay the price for her father’s audacity to raise voice against the system. But he is not ready to give up. Though three years have elapsed, he still has hope that his son and others like him could still be admitted to IITs by credit-transfers in the five year dual degree programme. And he knows such precedents, though RTI, of curse!