Eligibility Criteria for IIT-JEE Exam

The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to the undergraduate programmes in engineering would be conducted in two parts. JEE-MAIN and JEE-ADVANCED. The JEE-Advanced examination will be held after JEE-Main with a suitable time gap. Only the top 150,000 candidates (including all categories) in JEE-Main will be qualified to appear in the JEE-Advanced examination. Admissions to IITs will be based only on category-wise All India Rank (AIR) in JEE-Advanced, subject to the condition that such candidates are in the top 20 percentile of successful candidates in the respective Boards in applicable categories. As one time exception, in respect of those students who passed their Board exams in 2012, the eligibility criteria for joining IITs would be 60% marks in XII Board examination (55% for SC/ST/PD).

Marks to be secured by a candidate to fall within the top 20 percentile will vary from one Board to another and from one year to another year. The exact cut off of top 20 percentile marks in a Board marks will be known only after the Board results are declared, depending upon the marking pattern of any Board.

No two Boards are being equated, instead a candidate would be tested against his peers who have appeared in the same Board examination and whose performance has been evaluated in the same manner as them. The use of percentile ranking assumes that the quality of students is uniformly distributed across the Boards.

This information was given by the Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Dr. Shashi Tharoor in Rajya Sabha today.

BK/VSB/RS