Low cut-off in JEE Advanced 2022 will not impact admissions to IITs

Despite the lowest ever cut-off for JEE Advanced, the pool of qualifying candidates has not witnessed any major change this year

This year, any general category student who appeared for the JEE Advanced paper has been able to qualify the competitive exam by scoring 55 marks out of 360, which is the lowest ever cut-off in the exam’s history. Covid induced difficulties and the shift to online preparations are being earmarked as major reasons behind this phenomenon. Educators say that while the statistic may seem alarming, it will not affect the admission process to IITs in any way.
Various reasons
V Ramgopal Rao, professor and former director, IIT Delhi, says, “Engineering requires a practical teacher-learning approach to make concepts clear to students. Also, JEE Advanced candidates need to partake in higher levels of preparation to crack the exam. Unfortunately, over the last two years, the pandemic has pushed the entire educational community online, which has adversely impacted the preparation process for the exam and affected the cut-off.”

Deepankar Choudhury, professor and head, Civil Engineering, IIT Bombay and former organising vice-chairman of JEE Advanced (2015), says, “A difficult question paper might also have been one of the reasons behind the low cut off this year.”
No cause for worry
Choudhury says, “Cut-off is basically a passing mark for candidates to just qualify the exam. However. to get admission into an IIT, candidates must be among the top scorers in the exam. Thus, even if a lower cut-off affects the pool of qualifiers, it will not influence the admission process in any way.”

Statistics reveal that 15,277 general category candidates have qualified the JEE Advanced this year, preceded by 17,057 qualifying candidates in 2021, 18,028 (2020), 15,566 (2019), and 17,756 (2018). This suggests that even though this year recorded the lowest ever cut-off for JEE Advanced, the pool of qualifying candidates has not witnessed any major change.

Rao says that as of now, there is no cause for stakeholders related with JEE Advanced to panic. “Interaction with current engineering batches confirms that Covid has impacted students’ learning capabilities. It will take a minimum of two years for us to get over related difficulties. Thus, JEE Advanced cut-off may show some disparity next year as well. However, unless this phenomenon persists for the next couple of years, then we may have to explore the matter more deeply,” he says.



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