IIT-JEE: Gender gap still wide, only 14% of qualifiers are girls

CHENNAI: Sarvesh Mehtani of Panchkula’s Bhavan Vidyalaya topped the Joint Entrance Exam (Advanced), countrywide, this year. Pune boy Akshat Chugh (Delhi Public School) was all-India second (with a score of 335), and Delhi’s Ananye Agarwal (Hope Hall Foundation School) was third. The merit list was announced on Sunday.

Ramya Narayanasamy, from Madhapur, Hyderabad, with an all-India rank of 35, was the topper among the girls, and Shafil Maheen of Talakkad, Kerala, bagged top place in the south zone. With 10,240 of a total of 50,455 candidates across the country, IIT-Madras zone accounted for the most successful candidates in the JEE (Advanced) test results. IIT-Bombay, with 9,893 qualifiers, was second among seven zones.

It was followed by Delhi, with 9,207 qualifiers, Kanpur (6,809), Kharagpur (6,138), Roorkee (5,050) and Guwahati (3,118), said a statement from IIT-Madras, the organising institute for JEE (Advanced) this year.

The IIT-Roorkee and IIT Delhi zones each has three candidates in the top 10 ranks, IIT-Bombay has two, and Madras and Kanpur one each. The south zone also had the largest number of qualifiers in the top 100, with a total of 29.

Around 2.2 lakh students were eligible to write the JEE (Advanced) this year, with the quota increasing by 20,000 over 2016. The number of students eligible to take the test climbed from 1.5 lakh in 2015 to 2 lakh in 2016 due to an increase in IIT seats. As many as 1.72 lakh students registered for the ‘Advanced’ round of the entrance examination, of which 1.59 lakh — up from 1.47 lakh in 2016 — took the test for the 10,000-plus seats across the 23 IITs.

The gender gap on IIT campuses remains as wide as ever. While 33,358 girls registered for the exam, there were three times more boys (1.38 lakh). A total of 43,318 boys accounted for 86% of the successful candidates this year, with 7,137 girls qualifying.

Seven candidates qualified under the foreign category. Despite the IITs earmarking 1,000 slots for foreign candidates, only 598 foreign students registered for the Advanced round, of which 109 appeared and seven qualified. This year, foreign students had six centres to choose from, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Singapore, Ethiopia and the UAE.

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