IIT JEE Advanced Results Over 10 Years: Maths tougher, cut-offs drop, more women qualify

NEW DELHI: Maths has been getting tougher; more women are qualifying; cut-off scores for qualifying the entrance test for India’s top engineering colleges have fallen. After every round of the Joint Entrance Examination Advanced (JEE Advanced), the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) responsible for conducting it reports on the exam – number of applicants, JEE Advanced result data, total seats in IITs and more. The 2021 report from IIT Kharagpur shows that the JEE Advanced topper last year qualified with the higher percentage score since 2013.

JEE Advanced 2022 was conducted on August 28. IIT Bombay, the conducting body, will announce the JEE Advanced 2022 result on September 11. Careers360 looked at 10 years of data on the JEE Advanced – and IIT-JEE before 2013 – to understand how the exam for the top engineering colleges in the country has changed and how students have done over the years.

Over the decade, the exam itself has changed. In 2013, the IIT-JEE ceased to be a separate, standalone entrance test and became linked to the JEE Main. First conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and now by the National Testing Agency (NTA), the JEE Main serves as a preliminary round; only the top rankers are allowed to write the IIT test. JEE Advanced 2022 was open to the top 2.6 lakh JEE Main 2022 rank-holders.

The IIT system has expanded to include seven new IITs and the Banaras Hindu University engineering college upgraded to IIT-BHU Varanasi. The total number of seats grew 68.6% from 2011 to 2021; the exam became a fully computer-based test from 2018; new policy decisions saw more women being admitted; and the Covid-19 pandemic, too, forced a change in the exam pattern.

Over all the years, students emerging from schools affiliated to the (CBSE) – the vast majority of them private – have had a disproportionate success rate in the JEE Advanced.

Here are 10 charts on the JEE Advanced over the past 10 years.

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Total seats in IITs

The number of seats is a factor in determining the qualifying cut-offs in JEE Advanced and also the JEE Main cut-offs that determine which candidates are qualified to write the IIT exam.

The total number of seats grew from 9,627 in 2011 to 16,232 in 2021, an increase of over 68%. Seven new IITs joined the list – IIT Palakkad, Tirupati, Bhilai, Dharwad, Jammu and Goa, and two existing engineering colleges became IIT-BHU and IIT-ISM Dhanbad – adding to the seat count. IIT Palakkad and IIT Tirupati had started in 2015 with an initial capacity of 120 candidates each.

IIT Seats: Growth (2011-21)

Given the increase in the number of seats, in 2017, the top 2.2 lakh candidates in JEE Main were allowed to write JEE Advanced, up from the original one lakh which had been raised to 2 lakh over the previous few years.

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Qualifying JEE Advanced

In 2021, a total of 2,50,597candidates to qualify JEE Main were declared eligible to write JEE Advanced. Of the 1,41,699 candidates who finally wrote the exam, 30% qualified it. This was the highest since 2017 when it was nearly 32%. The percentage of students to qualify touched or crossed 30% in only these two years in the past decade. This was after the pre-decided qualifying criteria stated in the information brochure were “lowered down” – relaxed – to include more students, at least two times the number of seats available for each category.

The number – or even percentage – of students to qualify is not indicative of the general level of skill or talent among the applicants. Final qualifying cut-offs are decided after the exams and are based on the number of seats, difficulty levels and aggregate marks. For the past few years, the IITs have set the JEE Advanced cut-offs at scores allowing a number of students two times the number of seats to qualify. When the number of seats was low, the percentage to qualify was low; when the number of seats increased over the past decade, the percentage of aspirants to qualify increased as the number appearing for the exam hasn’t increased by much.

JEE Advanced: Qualified candidates

In 2011 and 2012, the IIT JEE was a separate exam with a much larger pool of direct applicants who weren’t sifted through a preliminary exam.

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In absolute numbers, the number of qualifying candidates has risen over 200% from 2011-2021. In 2017, as many as 51,040 students qualified the JEE Advanced examination, the highest in the last 10 years. But the reports do not explain why the number rose so sharply that year. It was the last time JEE Advanced was conducted as a pen-and-paper test.

JEE Advanced: More women qualify

The percentage of women candidates qualifying the JEE Advanced has risen steadily and the number writing it has remained over 30,000 for four years. In 2018, the IITs introduced supernumerary seats for women that can go up to 20%.

The qualification rate of women in the exam has improved significantly over the years – from 1.32% in 2011 to 19.98% in 2021. The highest percentage to qualify was in 2017 when close to a quarter of the women to write JEE Advanced qualified it.

Women qualifying JEE Advanced

JEE Advanced: Marginalised students

The number of Scheduled Caste students appearing for JEE Advanced has been steadily increasing with a three-fold rise since 2011. It was highest in 2019 where 8,742 Dalit students qualified the exam. As per the central reservation policy, 15% seats are reserved for SC applicants in all centrally-run institutions, including the IITs.

JEE Advanced: SC students

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The number of Adivasi students qualifying the exam has increased by 426% in the last 10 years. In 2011, it was 646 students and in 2021, it increased to 2,757 students. The increase in number of seats is a factor, of course, but the highest number of students from Scheduled Tribes to qualify was in 2017 with 13,490 students; this worked out to a 26% qualification rate. 7.5% seats are reserved for students from the Scheduled Tribes.

JEE Advanced: ST students

The percentage of students from the Other Backward Classes (OBC) to qualify has also grown. It was highest in 2020 with 6.09% of the students qualifying; 27% seats are reserved for OBC candidates.

JEE Advanced: OBC students

JEE Advanced paper analysis

JEE Advanced is considered to be one of the most difficult entrance exams to crack.

The data in the reports show that the average percentages of correct responses in the physics sections of papers 1 and 2 have erratically increased from 2012 to 2021. In 2021, the average percentage of correct responses for physics section of paper 1 was 20.16%; in paper 2 it was 13.06%. The 2013 batch had the most correct responses in both papers – 32.82% in paper 1 and 32.12% in paper 2. The question-wise percentages of correct responses could be averaged because the number of candidates for each paper remained constant.

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In the maths section, the average percentage of correct responses in papers 1 and 2, have been steadily decreasing since 2012. In 2021, the average percentage of correct responses in paper 1 maths was 14.67% and in paper 2, 11.24%. The maximum correct responses in papers 1 and 2 were in 2017 with an average of 35% in paper 1 and 37% in paper 2.

JEE Advanced: Average % of correct responses

JEE Advanced cut-off percentages

The IITs started making the cut-off percentage scores for qualifying the JEE Advanced public from 2016. Since then, the cut-offs have declined for all categories of applicants. The table below shows the cut-off scores for making it to various rank-lists – category-wise and the common rank list (CRL).

JEE Advanced Cut-offs: Minimum % Aggregate Marks

The cut-off percentages have fallen rather sharply with the increase in seats. With an increase of 5,660 seats and 5,296 candidates over 2016-21, cut-offs fell by 50 percentage points.

JEE Advanced: CBSE Vs state boards

Over 2010-2018, a huge number of students qualifying JEE Advanced examination were from CBSE schools. In 2015, 68.17% students who studied from CBSE qualified the JEE Advanced exam, highest among all the years.

The distribution of students by the school board has not been made publicly available from 2019. Before that, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra boards were typically a distant second or third each year.

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The table below shows which boards’ students had the second and third most number of students to qualify by year.

JEE Advanced: CBSE edge among qualified students

JEE Advanced toppers

According to the reports, JEE Advanced toppers’ percentage score is typically the early 90’s. The JEE Advanced 2021 topper scored 348 out of 360 or a 96%. The total score out of which candidates are marked changes with the change in paper pattern and whether questions are dropped due to errors. Therefore, the total marks vary from year to year.

JEE Advanced topper scores

In the last 10 years, the number of questions and patterns have changed. Between 2011- 2014, there were two sections with 20 questions in each section in paper 1 and three sections in paper 2. From 2016 till 2019, the number of questions again changed to 18 in each section with only two sections in each paper. Later, from 2017 until 2021, 19 questions were asked in each section.

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The table below shows how the JEE Advanced toppers did by subject. Physics is the only subject in which two toppers – 2021 and 2013 – scored 100%.

JEE Advanced toppers scores by subject

JEE Advanced: JoSAA counselling, vacant seats,

Counselling – the process of assigning BTech seats to qualified candidates – is now online and conducted by the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) under the ministry of education. The JoSAA counselling is conducted along with those taking admission only with JEE Main scores in National Institutes of Technology (NIT) and others. The concept of “computerised” validation of seat allocation was introduced in 2015, replacing a system of random manual checks of seat allocation.

Although regarded as top engineering colleges, even the IITs have vacant seats albeit their number has been declining. In 2019, there were just 21, down from 118 the previous year.

IIT: Vacant seats

The JoSAA counselling process usually runs for seven rounds. The vacancy status for 2020 and 2021 was not in the JEE Advanced reports.