When I joined IIT Bombay in 1973, I had AIR of about 250. Pretty decent. However I checked the board in the main building and found all the ranks and the raw scores. It was Narendra Karmarkar, JEE AIR 1, raw score 271 out of 300. Number 2 was Gurjar, JEE AIR 2, raw score 270.
Such narrow separations continued for a few more ranks and it started declining rapidly. I don’t remember my raw score but I remember rank number 300 had about 150 raw score. So I guess I scored about 160 raw or so.
Other department were still much lower. I didn’t check but my guess is that a person in civil or metallurgy had scored about 50 out of 300 in JEE.
What does it mean? If a person got a single problem correct could have jumped from Rejected to Civil immediately.. Are we playing Russian Roulette?
Second when I took the GRE Subject, GRE Advanced, GMAT a few years later – I scored all in 99%iles or around. Very people in the world had my scores. So how come I scored so lower than the toppers in electrical engineering? Were they so good. So what about their GRE scores, which is an international test. Almost everyone took it to do graduate studies in sciences and GMAT which by required by most to do MBA.
IITians took it too. But you will not find any mention of that in most blogs. They will mention their JEE scores with pride, and complete blank on GRE and partial blank on GMAT scores. What’s going on.
There is no mystery involved. We all know the real reasons. My classmates, many of them have attended top schools and have done well in life. They all have one thing in common. They won’t show their GRE and GMAT scores. They include gold medalist from IIM Ahmedabad, professor at IISc, HUDCO head and AIR 4 IAS officer, PhD from prestigious University of California at Berkeley and now has a house in Palo Alto and was involved with 17 start ups, founder of iFlex, an outsourcing company acquired by Oracle for billion plus dollars, and so on. Even Narendra Karmarkar, the famed mathematian. Here, I am showing my scores to everyone on my original site, these are completely silent and nobody in India is asking them too. Even billionaires like Vinod Khosla will talk about IIT days and grading by Kamath, but no mention of GRE.
We will explore why this focus on JEE but no mention of GRE, GMAT in another post.