More rural, women students have cleared JEE this time, claims CBSE

NEW DELHI: Faced with widespread criticism of the normalization method in JEE Mains, CBSE has now claimed that due to the new pattern, representation of students from rural backgrounds as well as of girl students has shown remarkable improvement.

In 2013, there were 136 students with rural background among the top thousand ranker. In 2012, there were only 90 students from rural India. Urban students representation went down to 864 this year from 910 in 2012. Rural representations also showed gradual growth among first two, three and four thousand rank holder. Among the top 5,000 ranker, there were 861 students from rural background. In percentage terms, 17.22% students among the top 5,000 were from rural India in comparison to 13.4% last year. Urban representation among the top 5000 came down to 82.78% in 2013 from 86.6% last year.

Female students, CBSE figures showed, increased their position among the topper. This year, among the top thousand rankers, there were 136 female student, and 749 among the top 5,000 rankers. Males representation among the top thousand rankers came down to 864 (86.4%) in 2013 compared to 904 (90.4%) last year and 924 (92.4%) in 2011.

Students from government schools are also beginning to make a slow but steady presence among the top rankers. But the rate is slow. Last year, 89 government school student were in the first one thousand. In 2013, it moved up to 117. In the top 5,000, there were 624 student from government school background, up from previous year's 545. Private school students continue to dominate. This year, of the first one thousand ranker, 883 students were from private school, a minor decline from last year's 911.