Brief Rebuttal of the arguments of Chairman-CBSE

The main argument of Chairman-CBSE, based on analysis of a larger data set (compared to what was made accessible to ISI and other members of Joshi Committee), is that Procedure 1 recommended by the Joshi Committee causes greater distortion to the existing procedure (based on AIEEE scores) than Procedure 2 promoted by him.

The counter-arguments are as follows.

* The alleged "distortions" to the performance patterns of different boards are less than 2%.

* The alleged "distortions" to the different boards' share in a percentile range happen in middle percentile ranges that are of no concern to NITs.

* The share of different boards in the top 5% of merit list (only range that matters to NITS) is distorted much more by Procedure 2 than by Procedure 1.

* The above distortion by Procedure 2 is grossly in favour of CBSE students.

ISI also provided a statistical explanation of these outcomes (see pages 14 and 15 of presentation).

ISI strongly refuted the argument that students of smaller boards gain unfairly from Procedure 1 (see page 16 of presentation).

ISI showed that a student of CBSE who stands at 93.1 percentile in Class XII board examination and a score of 130 in AIEEE 2012 would have rank 18,077 under Procedure 2, in contrast with rank 34,175 of a Maharashtra Board having the same AIEEE score and the same board percentile. Procedure 1 would not make this discrimination (see page 17 of presentation).

ISI refuted Chairman-CBSE's claim that Procedure 2 involves less assumption than Procedure 1 (see page 18 of presentation).

In summary, analysis of the new data corroborates the conclusions of the Joshi Committee.

It is appropriate to note here that what is being termed as "distortion" is perhaps a correction or adjustment that was originally sought, when the IITs and the NITs felt that the JEEE scores are not adequate measures for selection, and those need to be supplemented by class XII board scores.