IITs No More The First Choice For Engineering Aspirants! Find Out Why

Stepping into the hallowed portals of IITs is a childhood dream, but no more an ultimate goal for every engineering aspirants.

According to JEE admission figures, 72,000 of the 2.45 lakh JEE-Main qualifying candidates in 2019 did not sit for the JEE Advanced exam despite becoming eligible for it. They instead took admission to other universities and private institutes.

Students becoming conscious of their strength and weaknesses…

News portal The Print in a report said the candidates who dropped out by choice did not want to waste more time in the JEE-Advanced preparations to get into the IITs, unsure about their success at the exam and, hence, made a conscious decision to head for other engineering colleges. They are increasingly becoming aware of their strengths and weaknesses and are getting wiser.

Gone are the days when peer pressure would make even weak students toil hard to get into IITs, losing precious years in the process and ending nowhere. Today, there are multiple options available for engineering aspirants, it said.

It’s a tough exam after all…

“If a student has been ranked 1.5 lakh in JEE Main, chances are few that he or she will clear JEE Advanced,” said an IIT-Kanpur professor who has been involved with the admissions process.

“JEE Advanced is very tough and eventually only close to 40,000 students qualify for admission to IITs. For a student to waste two, three more months in trying to prepare for the advanced test then makes no sense and they rather choose to opt-out”, he told the Print.

JEE Main in a way helps a student realise his/her potential. For a candidate who has just about managed to make through for the JEE-Advanced, he would rather drop out and join a private university than slogging it out, said a director of a leading JEE coaching centre.

Little time to prepare for the JEE-Advanced…

It becomes equally difficult for these candidates to clear the JEE Advanced. The time available between JEE Main and JEE Advanced is also not adequate enough to prepare well and to the point of cracking the tough exam, he said.

In 2015, 28000 engineering aspirants did not take the JEE-Advanced. The drop our rate increase the following year and the figure touched 72000 in 2019.

For the uninitiated, roughly 10 lakh candidates register for the JEE-Main annually for admission to technical institutes including the NITs. Only the top 2.45 lakh candidates become eligible to sit for the JEE-Advanced for admission to the IITs.