The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Only 200 from Chennai qualify for IIT-JEE

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Saturday, May 31, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Only 200 from Chennai qualify for IIT-JEE

Shyam Ranganathan

Students attribute the poor performance to taxing academic year

— Photo: V. Ganesan

SHARING THEIR JOY: Candidates who have obtained ranks in the IIT-JEE, celebrate their success at a school in Chennai on Friday.

CHENNAI: Although 2,237 candidates have qualified from the Madras Zone (Zone 6) in the rank list for the IIT-JEE, only about 200 are from Chennai city itself. This is in keeping with the general trend in the last couple of years, say teachers training aspirants for the Indian Institute of Technology’s Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).

“In Chennai, students are under pressure to perform both in schools and entrance examinations unlike in other parts of the country. This affects their JEE preparation. By making the exams more objective, the thin line between exceptional students and good students gets blurred,” a professor, who has been coaching students for JEE for more than a decade, says.

This pressure has resulted in poor performances, students agree. G. Vignesh, a topper in the Indian National Maths Olympiad and ranked 694 in the JEE merit list, says the academic year is too heavy for them to concentrate on preparing for IIT-JEE. “The school pattern is completely different from the JEE pattern, and we have hardly a week to switch from one to the other because we are not allowed to slacken in either place. This slows us down a bit in the final stretch.”

Although Vignesh got nearly 95 per cent in his CBSE exams, he says he would not have minded scoring less in the board exams in return for more intensive coaching for JEE.

But Devesh Dixit, a teacher at the FIITJEE coaching centre, claims there is a solution to this problem. “With our Pinnacle Integrated Training Programme, we teach students the core subjects Maths, Physics and Chemistry in the regular classroom setting without special coaching outside. These subjects can be handled in an integrated manner with both board exams and JEE in mind, leaving the school teachers to teach the language and other papers,” he says.

A couple of schools in the city have signed up for this unique programme and he says the students have performed well with many getting above 90 per cent and also qualifying in the JEE merit lists. However, the topper from FIITJEE classes Kartik Rajagopalan, ranked 54 in the all-India merit list, comes from the regular classroom programme.

“I do not think studying for school and for the JEE are vastly different as I had to learn the same concepts in both places. But if too much importance is given to CBSE board exams, as happens in Chennai, it affects the performance in JEE,” says Kartik who plans to take up either Computer Science or Physics in IIT.

Kartik managed to score 96 per cent in his board exams and is also the 54th rank holder in IIT-JEE, but studying for two highly competitive exams can be extremely draining for most students. But for those who have not secured high ranks in JEE, the anxious wait will continue as the results for other exams are published over the next month. Counselling for admissions will take place between June 17 and June 21, and the courses allocated will be declared on June 30. Counselling for the one-year preparatory course for SC/ST students who did not make it to the merit lists will be held on July 7.

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