Why only 18K students cleared JEE Advanced, and other highlights from the IIT entrance

The results of the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) – the final examination that aspirants must clear in order to apply to the IITs – was announced on June 10. A total of 18,138 students qualified this year, a sharp drop from 2017, and the lowest in seven years. In 2017, 50,455 students qualified the JEE Advanced. 

IIT-Kanpur, which conducted the test, attributed the drop in the number of qualifiers to an error-free question paper, as no bonus marks were given for questions with errors. 

“Not a single question was dropped this year from the exam, which means after several years, no bonus marks were awarded to candidates. This is the main reason why the number of students qualifying the exam is controlled at 18,138 this year,” a senior official of the JEE Advanced organising chairperson’s office told Hindustan Times.

Despite the drop in the number of students who qualified, the number is still 1.6 times more than the number of seats available in the 23 IIT's across the country. Questions were raised about whether the seats would be filled, as the number of students who qualified earlier used to be at least double the seats available. 

"Last year, though 51,000 candidates made the cut, the last rank at which a seat was allotted was less than 14,000. So, with over 18,000 candidates, filling up seats should not be a problem even this year,” Chairman of JEE-Advanced at IIT-Delhi Professor Aditya Mittal told Indian Express.

The topper this year was Panchkula resident Pranav Goyal, who scored 337/360.

Here are the other highlights:

1. 3,595 students from the IIT-Madras zone qualified for seats in IIT. This zone saw five toppers, all of whom were from residential institutions in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The only zone to have more toppers than the IIT-Madras zone was the IIT-Delhi zone, which had 5,072 students who qualified.
2. Of the 18,138 students who qualified, only 2,076 are girls. As per the directive of the Union Education Ministry, 800 seats were created specifically for female candidates across the 23 IITs. This move was done in order to ensure that the gender balance in the IITs was improved, and to increase the enrolment from 8% in 2017 to 20% by 2020.
3. In Tamil Nadu, Chennai student P Girinath topped the state with an All India Rank (AIR) of 51. The Karnataka state topper, Bengaluru student Adway Girish secured AIR-43 with 289 marks. For Kerala, Amal Mathew from Kuruppumthara secured the first spot in the state, with an AIR of 85. In Andhra Pradesh, KVR Hemant Kumar Chodipilli from Visakhapatnam secured AIR-7, while Gosula Vinayaka Srivardhan from Sangareddy in Telangana obtained All India Rank AIR-11. MSK Manohar from Vijayawada topped the OBC category and Jatoth Shiva Tarun from Hyderabad secured the first rank from the ST category.
4. After the announcement of results, the first round of seat allocation will be held on June 27, and the second round will be held on July 3. The process will go on till July 19.
5. A total of 1,55,158 students appeared for the Paper 1 and Paper 2 of JEE Advanced 2018 on 20 May.

Students can check their result by logging on to the website.

For JEE mains, a total of 11,35,084 candidates registered, out of whom a total of 2,31,024 qualified for the JEE (Advanced).a