More than 12 lakh candidates took the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains 2016 held in two phases – offline on April 3, and online on April 9, and 10. The result for the same was declared by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on April 27, 2016. 

JEE Mains is the qualifying paper for Advanced and based on the ranking, students are allotted seats in the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. 

Of the 12 lakh engineering aspirants who took the JEE Mains paper, only top two lakh students qualify for Advanced. And this year, the cut-offs for Advanced were as low as 100 out of 360 in the general category as compared to 115 out of 360 in 2014 and 105 out of 360 in 2015. 

PaGaLGuY spoke to JK Yadav, Deputy Secretary, JEE Unit, to know the reason for the drop in cut-offs. He said, “Till 2015, only 1.5 lakh students qualified for JEE Advanced, but this year two lakh candidates will take the paper. So to get 50,000 students, we had to lower the cut-offs.” 

According to the Ministry of Human Resource of Development (MHRD) report, four new IITs in the states of Chattisgarh, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, and Karnataka will become operational from the current academic session. And some of the newer IITs will also offer more courses. 

However, Ashish Gupta, MD, Bansal Classes, Jaipur, had a different take on low cut-offs. He said, “The JEE Mains 2016 paper was lengthy and had many inaccurate questions because of which students wasted a lot of their precious time. Therefore, students attempted fewer questions, and so the cut-offs are as low as 100 in the general category. “

He continued, “Mains paper was based on the NCERT syllabus. It was conceptually clear but because of multiple answers and negative marking, even the overall scores remained low.”