Out of the 1.5 lakh students allowed to appear for JEE (Advanced) across the country, only 75,750 will be selected based on JEE (Main) list. The IITs have finalised the eligibility criteria for the new JEE to be held from 2013. The JEE will be held in two parts, namely JEE (Main) and JEE (Advanced).

Out of 1.5 lakh students to be allowed to appear for the JEE (Advanced) across the country for admission to the IITs, only 75,750 students (50.5 per cent) from all categories will be selected based on JEE (Main) merit list.

From reserved categories, the limit will be 40,500 students from OBCs (27 per cent), 22,500 from SCs (15 per cent) and 11,250 from ST communities (7.5 per cent). With this, the number of students competing for seats in the IITs will be significantly lower in 2013 onwards, as nearly five lakh students had appeared for the old IIT-JEE in 2012.

Experts said that the com petition will be extremely tough this year as they also need to figure in the top-20 percentile in the 10+2 board exams.

The students to be selected from reserved quotas will be those who do not figure in the 75,750 chosen from the common merit list.

Besides, three per cent of the candidates selected within each category will be those belonging to the PwD (persons with disability) sub-category, who figure
in the respective rank lists of JEE (Main).

Only the candidate’s aggregate marks in JEE (Main) will be considered and no tie-break mechanism will be implemented at this stage.

This will make the list of candidates eligible to appear in JEE (Advanced) slightly more than 1,50,000 due to bunching of candidates with the same aggregate marks at the bottom of each category.