The Joint Engineering Exam (JEE) will see some drastic changes from 2017. Students will now have to score a minimum of 75 percent in their standard 12 board exam or be in the top 20 percentile of the state board, to be able to qualify for the JEE Mains 2017. JEE officials also confirmed that the syllabus for JEE mains will remain THE same, i.e. 11 and 12 standard NCERT textbooks.

JEE is the qualifying exam for admissions to the IITs, NITs, IIITs and other GFTIs for students across all the state boards. “We faced an issue with standardising the marks of students who came from different state boards and CBSE. Hence the normalisation process was carried out using the 60:40 criteria. From JEE 2017, there will be no normalisation of marks. 12 standard boards will be the qualifying exam for JEE Mains, and hence we will eliminate the tedious process of normalising the scores and ranks,” says Prof. Ashok Misra,  the chairman of the committee set up to revise and introduce changes in JEE.

The exam is a two step process, where the students first appear for the JEE Mains and if they qualify, are eligible for the JEE Advanced. The ranks, until the previous year were  calculated by giving a 40 percent weightage to 12 standard board exam and 60 percent weightage to the score in JEE mains. However from 2017, students will be able to take the JEE only if they secure a minimum of 75% in their 12 standard board exam, or make it to the top-20 percentile of scorers. 

The sub clause to this rule is that the student must also have scored a minimum of 45% in each of the subject he/she has taken in the 12 standard boards, including the languages.This has caused a few jitters among the aspirants. “If I score even one percent less than 75, I won’t be able to appear for JEE. Previously at least, I would have been eligible for admissions to NITs and IIITs or GFTIs with the JEE mains score. This move will increase the stress by many folds for us aspirants.” says Annika Karade, from Mumbai. Her elder sister is in her sophomore year at IIT Delhi, and Annika feels it was easier for her sister to get into to the prestigious IIT. 

The move was introduced to keep eliminate unnecessary complications in the admission process. It was also to set a certain uniformity in the eligibility criteria of the students. 

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