MUMBAI/PUNE: The challenge of maintaining standards at the IITs seems to be growing. While IIT-Roorkee last week expelled 73 students for underperformance (first reported by TOI), it now appears this elite group of institutions will have to lower the bar to admit students from the weaker sections.In a comment on the lack of success in raising school education standards, especially for the disadvantaged, the IITs will be admitting students with scores as low as 31 out of 504, or 6.1%, this year to fill vacant seats (compared to 8.8% in 2014). Subjective components in the JEE (Advanced) 2015 question paper and use of higher negative marks made it tougher this year. IITs had to therefore lower the bar for qualifying in the general category from 35% to 24.5%. For the reserved categories, cut-offs came down to 12.25%. Since IITs do not manage to fill all seats in these categories even after lowering cut-offs, qualifying marks will be further reduced to create a third category for students who will be sent for a preparatory course provided they’ve got at least 6.1%.As reported by TOI on Monday, after the first round of seat allocations, 591 seats were vacant, and the majority of them, say officials, are reserved for students in ST (scheduled tribes) and PwD (people with disabilities) categories.An IIT director said final position on seat vacancies will be known after the third round, but indicated that “IITs have to follow constitutional reservation. Seats cannot be kept vacant due to the sheer demand for admissions in our institutes,” he said, but “what government can instead do is improve secondary education. Also the tutoring system for preparatory courses needs to evolve in IITs to ensure they are fit for our B Tech programmes.”Under the new formula for admissions this year, the IITs have already admitted over 180 students (who scored above 31 and less than 62 marks) in the preparatory programme across 18 institutes. The numbers may go up after the three rounds.More students with marks in this range may be added over the next two rounds. These students will then have to go through a one-year-long preparatory course before they are absorbed in the B Tech programme.The preparatory course is a year-long special coaching programme in physics, mathematics and chemistry, for reserved category candidates who fail to make the cut in the entrance. Numbers of students admitted to preparatory courses are not more than 10 in most institutes, in the older the numbers may go up to 20 sometimes.Another professor said part of the reason for the drop in cut-offs was the mismatch in quality of students coming from urban and rural areas. While urban students can make up for gaps in school education by enrolling in coaching institutes, others who cannot afford lag behind, said another professor.He added that quotas needed to be supplemented with stronger schooling, especially for the weaker sections of society.At a time when qualifying marks are being reduced, 31 students who qualified in JEE (Advanced) and were eligible for seats in the IITs have been rejected after they failed to meet class XII eligibility criteria of being in the top 20 percentile of their respective boards or even scoring 75% and above. A few of these students would have managed to get seats in even the older sought-after IITs.Till last year, a student had to be in the top 20 percentile of their respective boards to be eligible for an IIT seat. Around 240 students were denied seats last year despite qualifying in JEE (Advanced). This year, the IITs relaxed the criteria by allowing students who had scored at least 75% in class XII or were in the top 20 percentile of the board. As a result, only 31 students failed to make the cut.