Telegraph ::
IIT cut-off raises brows
CHARU
The concerns were dismissed by a top IIT-JEE official as “tilting at windmills”. But the fact that the aggregate cut-off did not change much in 2010, suggesting that the difficulty level of questions was similar to previous years’, offers legitimacy to these concerns.
The IIT-JEE this year was ravaged by errors in instructions given in question papers. One of the major errors involved instructions, which erroneously switched the labelling on physics and math answer scripts, which are read by an optical mark reader (OMR) machine.
Instructors at all test centres announced the error once it was recognised, but many students had already started marking answer scripts by that time — and these answer scripts were not replaced with fresh ones. Amid fears that many students might have marked physics answers where they were to mark math answers and math instead of physics for no fault of theirs, the IITs announced a “corrective measure”.
The OMR machine would mark answer sheets meant for physics (or math) for both subjects and award students the higher ! score. This way, the institutes argued, a student who followed! the ins tructions and marked correct physics (or math) answers on the math (or physics) answer sheet would not lose out.
But in an affidavit before
A handful of such questions — where an incorrect answer matched the correct answer of the other subject — would suffice to clear the average cut-off in that subject, he argued.
Kumar’s concerns have now triggered a debate within the IITs and among IIT-JEE observers over whether his arguments need a relook, following ! the hike in subject cut-offs announced by the IITs on Saturday! .
The IITs first shortlist students who clear subject cut-offs in each of the three subjects tested — physics, chemistry and math. An aggregate cut-off of total scores across the three subjects is set next, based on the total number of seats available to finalise selected candidates.
The subject cut-offs in physics, chemistry and math this year are 19, 19 and 17 respectively as opposed to 8, 11 and 11 in these subjects last year, according to data released on Saturday by the IITs. The sam! e formula — the average marks of all students in a subject is set as the subject cut-off — was followed both in 2009 and 2010.
The hike could normally be explained by easier questions — or better average performance — this year. But such a scenario would also mean much higher aggregate scores of students on average — 55 as opposed to 30 last year. This, in turn, would translate into a correspondingly higher aggregate cut-off.
The aggregate cut-off in the 2010 JEE, according to the IITs, was 19! 0 as opposed to 178 last year — a difference statistical! ly much smaller than the variation between aggregate averages in 2009 and this year. In other words, while the average scores of students improved, the toppers performed almost similar to their counterparts last year — suggesting the question papers were overall not much easier in 2010 compared with 2009.
Some candidates scoring higher than they deserved, because of the corrective measure, would offer a possible explanation for the hike in subject marks without a corresponding jump in the performance of qualified candidates.
Times of
IIT JEE average mark almost doubles but question remains
Akshay Mukul, TNN,
Is the increase in cut-off — calculated on the basis of average performance of candidates — a case of improved standards or is it due to the corrective measures applied by IITs to neutralise errors in the JEE question paper as pointed out by TOI?
In order to paper over its mistakes, IIT-JEE, for the first time, evaluated each answer sheet in two ways — sequential question numberwise and subject headingwise. The higher score of the two systems was taken as a candidate’s score. This strategy wa! s adopted to offset the interchange of subject headings of mathematics and physics in question paper and Optical Response Sheet. IIT is not disclosing the marks scored by both ways of evaluation. Now, IIT insiders are pointing out faults with this method.
Normally, IITs evaluate the JEE question paper by the sequential method. A senior faculty member of IIT-Delhi said, “Sequencewise evaluation is how evaluation should be done. But subject ! heading-wise evaluation leads to going through mathematics ans! wers on the basis of instructions which was for physics. A similar thing happened in case of physics answers. The second way of evaluation may give higher score to candidates who performed poorly.” JEE is a traditionally low-scoring examination.
The cut-off for general category candidates this year is 190, a slight improvement from last year’s 178. However, this year’s average marks for mathematics, physics and chemistry is 17, 19 and 19 respectively, making the average marks 55 out of 489. The same procedure was applied for deciding cut-off in 2009 and 2010. If we compare the average marks of 2009 and 2010, it is clear that cut-off of physics this year is almost 2.4 times last year’s cut-off. Mathematics cut-off is 1.5 times more than last year.
This is much higher than the subject average of 2009 that was 11 (mathematics), 8 (physics) and 11 (chemistry). The average marks last year was 29 out of 489. Thus, the overall performance in 2010 is 1.9 times better than last year. The marginal increa! se in cut-off — 178 to 190 — is indicative that th! e perfor mance of the selected candidates has marginally improved. However, the overall performance is almost double. “A clearer picture,” a source said, “will emerge only when IITs reveal both ways of evaluation.”
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