Fill in at least 50 choices to stay in race for IITs

CHENNAI: For the first time since the IIT admission process went online, the institutes have introduced a change in the counselling process to ensure that IIT aspirants are not forced to drop out of the race because they failed to select appropriate courses.
The organizing committee has introduced a provision in the joint online choice filling and seat allocation portal that makes it mandatory for all applicants to choose a minimum of 50 choices when they select the stream and institute of their choice in the central counselling process.Vice-chairman of the organizing committee of this year's test S K Pal said, "The initiative is to help students, after a student with a good enough all India rank in last year's JEE (Advanced) failed to get a seat because he did not feed sufficient choices during the counseling process."
Results of the JEE (Advanced) were released on Thursday. As many as 27,151 of the 1.26 lakh candidates who took the test qualified.
Industry observers said that the candidate who spurred the IITs to introduce the change in the counseling software is one of the many who make the mistake. Educational consultant D Nedunchezhiyan, founder of web portal TechnocratIndiaCollegeFinder.com, which guides students in making these choices, said that after they clear the JEE students are so elated and overconfident that they neglect to select enough choices.
More candidates started making mistakes after the counselling process went online. In the offline counselling process, candidates could consult IIT professors about their choices. The helpline does not come in handy when it's online, candidates said.
Nedunchezhiyan recalls a student who made the same mistake last year and was left to choose between a mining course and an electronics engineering seat in the National Institute of Technology, Trichy. He opted for NIT. "All those years of hard work went to waste because he did not make the right choice. Cracking JEE (Advanced) is only half the job done. Filling the right choices is as important as taking the test, and needs a lot of thought," said Nedunchezhiyan.
Many candidates don't know that they can make any number of choices, and it's best to fill in as many choices as possible, he said. He counsels 70 students in Kota, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai, some over Skype, on the best choices. Coaching institute FIITJEE also conducted a counselling session for around 200 students who trained under them in Chennai on how to make the right choices. Aspirants can also log on to forums to discuss their choices.
To ensure that all the seats in the 16 IITs and ISM, Dhanbad, are filled, the joint implementation committee of JEE (Advanced) is allowing twice the number of candidates in each category to apply. Last year the committee allowed 1.5 times as many candidates as there were seats.