I didn’t.
It was the goddamn normalization that screwed my rank in JEE Main.
Brace yourselves, you are going to learn something completely new today - the flawed normalization system.
So, I scored 323/360 in JEE Main 2013 and got an All India rank of 617. While with a score of 293/360 in JEE Advanced 2013, I was ranked 33 All India. How did such a drastic change happen in a matter of 2 months?
The reality is that no change happened. If you consider purely JEE Main marks (323/360), it is 100% sure that my rank would have been among the top 50. But, it got screwed simply because I scored a meager 93.6% in CBSE 2013. Who cares!
But, let us try and understand how my (and probably your) rank got screwed up due to normalization.
Disclaimer: the figures below are almost 6 years old and the exact numbers may be wrong since I have a bad memory. Please bear with me. Focus on understanding the flaw than on the numbers.
With a percentage of 93.6, my CBSE percentile was around 97.75. This means that I was ahead of 97.75% of candidates in CBSE 2013.
Now, let’s see what this figure is for JEE Main 2013. The cut-off for JEE Main 2013 was 113/360. Basically, the person who scored a rank of 75,000 (General category) was the last person who was allowed to appear for JEE Advanced 2013 as per the rules that year. This means that if you score almost 33% in JEE Main, you will still be among the top 75,000 in the country, out of almost 7 lakh candidates (I assume that almost 50% of the 14 lakhs who appear for JEE Main are from General Category).
So, what would be the JEE Main score of the person whose percentile in JEE Main is 97.75?
Hang on, what?
What would be the JEE Main score of the person whose JEE Main percentile is 97.75?
Hmm. We don’t have much data about that. Let’s try and make a guess. Assuming that we count only 7 lakhs of General category candidates, a percentile of 97.75 means a rank of about 16,000. If you search on Google for ‘AIEEE rank vs marks’, you’d get several links. Each of them will give you an estimate of around 200/360 marks.
For the uninitiated, JEE Main was called AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Exam) until the year 2012.
So, let us assume that the gentleman with the score of 200/360 in JEE Main stood at the 97.75 percentile. Now, how did they calculate my normalized score?
Well, they used the simple formula - 40% weightage to board exams (obscure!) plus 60% weightage for JEE Main score. So, this is how it works:
My final normalized score = 0.4 x 200 + 0.6 x 323 = 273.8 out of 360. Now you see how my rank got screwed?
So, to incorporate the marks of board exams, they normalized the goddamn percentile, without realizing that percentiles in both the exams work very differently. While only a few manage to get 250+ out of 360 in JEE Main, the entire crowd gets above 90% in CBSE. So, normalizing the marks of both these exams is utterly stupid. but that’s how Kapil Sibbal had to propose it.
A friend of mine who got AIR 2 in JEE Advanced 2013 was ranked 1221 in JEE Main 2013.
All we can do is laugh at the normalization system, because, I least care about my JEE Main rank. It was just a number on the resume that nobody cared about after seeing the rank in JEE Advanced.
Footnotes
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