The state’s craze for IIT education hit a crescendo for the second successive year when AP students bagged top honours in the IIT-JEE results. Andhra Pradesh hit a jackpot on Wednesday, bagging five of the top ten ranks in the entrance examination. In 2010, the state had bagged seven of the top 10 ranks.
I Prudhvi Tej from West Godavari district scored the first rank in the examination. Other rank holders from the state include V Shaimak Reddy (3rd), B Saikiran (4th), T Bhargava Reddy (8th) and J Varun (9th). The results of the reserved categories too had students from AP sitting pretty on the first ranks. Rama Krishna Banoth was the top ranker in the ST category and J Varun was the topper in the OBC category.
A jubilant Prudhvi Tej said he stuck to his study schedule, skipped the state engineering entrance and aimed only at a good rank in IIT.
A film buff, Tej said he was looking forward to doing his electrical engineering from IIT-Bombay. “I was sure I would get a good rank in IIT,” he said.
The results created much frenzy among the coaching centres in the city, which held various events to felicitate the toppers from their institutions.
Officials overseeing the examination said that AP bagged over 15 ranks in the top 100 in the general category section.
The south zone, comprising all four southern states, secured 30 of the top 100 ranks. In reserved categories, AP bagged 35 ranks in top 100.
IIT-JEE experts said that students from the state perform well in the examination as they grasp the basic format of the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) question paper. “In the entrance test, several concepts are mixed to form a question. There are no straight forward questions in JEE and the IIT trainers from AP have understood the idea better than those in other states,” said Prof T S Natarajan from IIT-Madras, who is also chairman of JEE South Zone Committee.
Others attributed the rich harvest of ranks to AP’s IIT focus over the last three decades. “We as a state are so clued in to IIT preparations that even the state government recently changed the Intermediate syllabus to suit the interests of JEE takers. Students feel that landing a seat in IIT is the ultimate goal,” said D V Rao, vice-chairman, Narayana group of institutions. He explained that the state is the only place where IIT syllabus is taught right from Class VI. ‘Tough Maths paper a blessing for AP students’
Explaining the 2011 success, JEE teachers said that this year too, it was the Mathematics paper that helped students climb the rank ladder. AP students are traditionally good at Mathematics and score higher than their compatriots from other states. “Like last year, the mathematics paper was tough in JEE-2011. This could have worked in favour of the students from the state many of whom have scored well in the subject. The saying is if Chemistry is tough, students from other states score well and if the Maths paper is tough we score better,” explained an IIT expert. However, the faculty of IIT coaching institutes are still unimpressed with the state’s performance.
They said that more students from Andhra Pradesh would have bagged top ranks had the JEE paper-setters avoided question paper errors. “The state could have scored at least two more ranks had there not been er rors in the paper. There were two students who missed it by three to four marks,” said a faculty member.