When Bhavishya Suresh got his results for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for a B.Arch course this May, he was pleased with his performance.
“I got an all India rank of 2,033… I was aiming for a 99.2 percentile and I achieved that, so I was pretty confident that I would get into an NIT [National Institute of Technology],” said the 18-year-old. A month later, on June 27, he got through the first round of counselling and was provisionally allocated a seat in the architecture programme of NIT, Bhopal.
The very next day, his dream of becoming an architect came crashing down when he went to the centre for document verification at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “They told me the eligibility requirement was 75% aggregate marks in the Class 12 examination, despite the fact that the government notification [from the National Testing Agency and the Joint Seat Allocation Authority] had said 50% was needed,” said Mr. Suresh, who had scored an aggregate of 69.2%. “They said the rules had been changed” in the preceding week, he added.
On June 19, well after the JEE examination and results, the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) issued a brief corrigendum amending the requirement.
sThe last minute change left a section of students stranded and angry. As late as July 3, the main business rules on the JoSAA website still featured the 50% aggregate requirement for B.Arch admission.
S.T. Ramesh, coordinator of the Central Seat Allocation Board-2019, admitted that a mistake had been made in the JoSAA rules. “Point number 1 in the rules makes it clear that admission into any NIT requires a 75% aggregate. But point number 2 seemed to indicate a 50% aggregate, so we amended it last week to avoid the conflicting statements,” said Dr. Ramesh, adding that the CSAB was in discussions with the Ministry of Human Resource Development regarding the fate of students affected by the change for no fault of their own.
A senior official at the HRD Ministry told The Hindu that the error seemed to stem from a Council of Architecturse revision of minimum standards, which was accidentally incorporated into the JoSAA rules. Acknowledging that students were not to blame for the confusion, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that in previous cases of miscommunication, supernumerary seats had been created to accommodate those affected. “We don’t want to let the students suffer,” added the official.
Students are worried that their futures have been left hanging in the balance despite months of hard work. “I had actually taken an extra gap year after Class 12 to prepare for JEE Main, and was excited to get admission to NIT Bhopal,” said a 19-year-old Delhi student, who faced the same problem, but did not wish to be identified. “At the document verification centre, they told us there was one student who scored 74.5% in Class 12, but got denied last minute because of this.”
“I took tuition every day, and spent all my weekends at a coaching institute for which my parents paid more than one lakh rupees,” said Mr. Suresh. “At the start of the year, I was told I need 50% in my boards. They cannot change the rules at this stage,” he added.
