Joint Entrance Exam is being conducted from last 5 decades & it has been one of the most controversial exams in India.
Although JEE Admission Board (JAB) always tries to ensure the minimal inconsistencies & fair selection process, the exam could not escape from the claws of criticism.
There were several instances when the exam was targeted by students, educators & other institutes. Many people defend IITs & JAB for conducting a scandal-free UG Admission Exam over last 50 years. On the other hand, with the knowledge of this background, some educators expect the selection & admission process to be fairer & transparent.
Here are some highlights of the major IIT JEE controversies that became the burning topic in their times.
1. Madras High has asked to reconsider the negative marking scheme in competitive exams likes JEE. As the judge said that the court was unable to understand as why this method is followed by CBSE (former JEE Main conducting body), after noting the fact that developed countries do not follow negative marking.
A 2013 JEE aspirant, has petitioned that he had fallen short of the cut-off score by 3 marks due to negative marking. he asked to reevaluate his physics and mathematics answer sheets and publish the marks to enable him to take the JEE (Advance) exam.
Though the court decided to provide the relief to him by allowing to give the exam but CBSE declined that.
The judge said that, “negative marking acts only as a bolt in the brain development of the students”.
But the decision is yet to be made.
2. As per the notification released in the month of July 2018, the National Testing Agency will tool over the charges of exam convener body of JEE Main. Therefore, from 2019, JEE Main Exam is held twice and only in the online mode.
The 1st session of JEE Main exam was held in January 2019 and the second session was held in April as it is held every year.
You can check the detailed information here - NTA Replaces CBSE.
3. On 13th June 2018, as per the instructions of MHRD, IIT Kanpur issued a fresh merit list for Joint Entrance Exam Advanced (JEE) 2018 due to the low number of qualifiers in the examination this year. The ministry asked the Joint Admission Board to issue a supplementary merit list for the JEE Advanced 2018 admission.
In session 2018 approximately 1.6 lakh students appeared for IIT JEE Advanced exam, out of which only 18,138 students were able to qualify it.
You can also have a look on to the tweet by the Union Education Minister Prakash Javadekar -
...If necessary by releasing a supplementary list."
— Prakash Javadekar (@PrakashJavdekar) 14 June 2018
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4. In 2017, The Apex Court sought the response from IITs regarding the 18 bonus marks is awarded to students on account of printing inconsistencies in JEE Advanced Paper.
As the case was impeded in the Supreme court, IITs had to put a bar on the ongoing counseling process & hence the fate of 30,000 students is sealed by the Apex court.
The petition was filed by 97 JEE applicants, who were dissatisfied with the merit list. The petitioners plead for the conduct of fresh exam.
5. In order to make evaluation easier, JAB released an official statement to conduct the JEE Advanced Exam Online from 2017 onward.
However, the basic computer competency level of most of the candidates from the rural areas is relatively lower, which made them feel performance blocked due to online exam.
There was a protest in Patna against this move of JEE Admission Board. Some aspirants from the other less-developed states criticized this decision too.
To ensure students do not face any problem in taking the test online, three-day training was provided. During the training, they were allowed to take mock tests and operate the system. NTA is still providing the training session for such aspirants.
However, candidates are still dismissive about the technological advancement in the conduct of the exam.
Read latest news about IIT JEE at - JEE Advanced Latest Notification.
6. JEE Exam is criticized for being conducted in English & Hindi only. This gives lesser opportunities to those who belongs to the regions like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka etc.
7. IIT JEE Criticism queue continues with the reported low level of the examination. Some experts, including the founder of Infosys, Mr. Narayan Murthi, believe that quality of engineers emerged out by premier IITs has desecrated.
This remark has brought a lot of criticism to the IITs & IITians. There is no provision of section-wise cut off marks or standardized scores in IIT JEE. Hence, All India Ranks of candidates are found to correlate very highly with the marks in one subject and very little with that in another subject. This basic idea of testing the knowledge of candidate in PCM is diluted.
8. JEE Exam is known for the coaching programs with sky-high fee structure. Students have raised multitude of issues regarding the preparation regime & functioning of the coaching. This issue has been discussed widely at many seminars, public forums & television programs.
The dissatisfied aspirants have made many fair points regarding the JEE Coaching. Firstly, the high fee structure of popular JEE Coaching is less affordable for the aspirants who hail from lower economic class. Second, even after paying a good fortune to these coaching classes the effectiveness of the preparation program is questionable. There has been many cases in recent past that indicates the increased pressure & anxiety in aspirants due to the study-focused environment.
9. In order to implement exam with great efficiency, every year the JEE Exam is re-designed & restructured. This causes a lot of trouble to the candidates. Because there are no footprints that they can follow for the upcoming exam & start all over at their own.
10. MHRD proposed to conduct Single Entrance Exam for Engineering in 2018. The committee proposed to scrap JEE Mains Exam. This created a lot of buzz among engineering aspirants. However, due to some reasons the Common Entrance Exam for Engineering couldn’t come into existence. MHRD cleared the air by providing an official statement but still there are speculations regarding this.
Other controversies like IIT JEE Paper Leak in 1997, Post Paper Errors, Banishing Paper-Pen Mode, News regarding scrapping the Multiple Choice Objective Questions, Improved scores due to bonus marks were some shocking events associated with IIT JEE exam in past.
Whenever the talk about world-class academic institute beckons, aspirants look at IITs & IISC with a great deal of expectations. IIT Management has done a great job in maintaining a clean image of exam, even though this test has been fallen into the prey of some mild controversies that PCM students would like to know about.
