The number of Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)-Advanced registrations have declined in the last nine years, the Indian Express has reported. An analysis of the JEE’s data since 2014 has shown a downward trend over the last eight years.
According to the report, the registrations have gone down from 83.1% in 2014 to 61.5% students in 2022. While 1.6 lakh out of the 2.6 lakh qualified candidates have registered to write the exam this year, 1.5 lakh out of the 2.6 lakh candidates registered to write JEE-Advanced in 2021. A steady drop has been noticed across the years at 79%, 78.6%, 77.4%, 71.7%, and 71.7% in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, respectively, the report further stated.
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JEE-Advanced, which determines admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) across the country, is scheduled to be held on August 28. According to experts, the dip in the number of candidates writing the exam is because students choose other engineering colleges based on their JEE-Mains score and it does not indicate a lack of interest in the IITs.
A senior professor from IIT Bombay said, “Students with lower ranks in JEE-Main are not sure of bagging a seat in IIT after Advanced. However, that JEE-Main score is a sure seat in a long list of good technology institutes across India, holding admission based solely on the JEE-Main result.”
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The report further quoted IIT Delhi’s former director, V Ramgopal Rao, who said that the branch of engineering also played a vital role in making the choice. “Everything these days is decided by students based on popular branches. If after JEE-Main, someone is going to get a better branch at the National Institute of Technology, most likely the candidate will go ahead with it, rather than settling for an engineering branch they he/she may not see a future in,” he said.