IIT's IIM's follow BITS

Okay, the topic might be a little biased owing to my bitsian nature, but no one can deny the fact the two premier institutes in the country have gone the BITS way. Kapil Sibal’s new proposal makes it mandatory for students to have a an 80% board percentage, and IIM’s seem to be going online (you can read the article here), something that BITS did long ago (both of them). I wont argue about the online test system because its high time we did that, but is 80% percentage really necessary for any institute??

First of all as an IIT aspirant myself who has given both boards and JEE, i can say that even though syllabus of both boards and JEE is more or less the same, there is a huge difference in the level of the course. While boards keep to the basics of without going much into derivations and details, JEE expects us to know the in depth analysis of each topic we study. Therefore it is safe to say that a person preparing for JEE wont find it difficult to get 80% in boards because basically the concepts are the same. And if a person is good enough to clear IIT, boards should be a cakewalk for him. Moreover, mostly the board question pattern remains same every year and it is easy to predict the questions. So i don’t particularly think that keeping the 80% cut off for JEE will drastically change the quality of students getting into IIT, unless you take boards too lightly and write the exams with too much overconfidence. (which happened to a guy In my college, who scored 350 in BITSAT ,the entrance test for BITS but failed to clear the 80% cut off as he took the boards for granted and therefore had to join in the second semester. Though the fact that he couldn’t score 80% in boards doesnt make him less worthy but does make him lose a semester.)

However i do feel that the cut off criteria will certainly create unnecessary pressure on the students. Even though there was a minimum of 60% required in boards before, but that’s something that you usually get without much bother in boards. But 80% cut off will definitely be playing on the back of the minds of the aspirants. Even though i maintain that isn’t difficult to score 80% in boards, it is enough to make the students uncomfortable. They would definitely take boards more seriously and spend more time on it than they usually would. Till now, people just used to open books a day or so before the exams but now they will definitely be more watchful in boards, considering the fact that boards are now playing an important role in their dreams to crack JEE.

All in all i feel, even though it isn’t difficult for a serious JEE aspirant to score 80%in boards, it definitely does add pointless burden on the students and in the rarest of cases (as the guy in my college) costs a worthy student a seat (or a semester). Without the cut off, people can easily concentrate on their preparations for JEE which is undoubtedly more important to them than boards. Thus i prefer that cut off should be reduced to 70 or 75% as the figure 80 invariably plays with the psychology of the students and adds an additional onus of the board exams (and i speak for every institute which has this criteria, including BITS)