Engineering aspirants to now need 75 percent marks in Class 12 boards

Aspirants for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for premier engineering institutes from 2017 onwards will be required to score 75 percent marks in their Class 12 board exams, an official statement said on Thursday.

"For the candidates to qualify in the JEE, they shall have secured at least 75 percent marks or be in the top 20 percentile in the 12th class examination conducted by respective Boards. For Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes students, this condition shall be relaxed to 65 percent marks," said the human resource development ministry statement.

"The performance of the students in the 12th class examination shall be a crucial parameter for determining the eligibility of the student for the JEE," it said, adding that this decision was taken after examining the report of the Ashok Misra committee and considering the public feedback, and had been notified in the JEE pattern from 2017.

The present system of giving 40 percent weightage for the Class 12 marks in calculating the ranks in the main round of JEE has also been done away with, it said but all other JEE systems shall remain unchanged.