The Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) has announced the cut-offs for the first round of seat allocation on its official website. The cut-offs are announced specific to the institutions, and while interested candidates need not log in to check these, they will be required to enter details such as Round Number, Institute Type, Institute Name and Academic Programmes. These cut-offs come relatively late — after the announcement of the second round of seat allotment on November 1, when students have been expecting them since the first list of seat allotment was released on October 16.
So why were the students awaiting JoSAA's announcement of the list of cut-offs for various institutions? The cut-offs will throw some light on the minimum marks that a student requires to qualify for the institutions. However, the closing and opening ranks have not been announced yet.
Once the seats are allocated to the students in various rounds, they are allowed three options to proceed with the admission process. These are Freeze, Float and Slide. The first option applies when the candidate is happy with the seat allotted and decides to pay the fee and proceed with the rest of the admission process. Students are required to opt for the Float method when they want to try their hand at upgrading to a better seat, whilst keeping their allotted seats safe and reserved. The Slide option comes into the picture when students want to release the seat they were allotted and look for a different one.
This centralised online admission process admits qualified candidates into prestigious institutes like IITs (23), NITs (31), IIITs (26), Government Funded Technical Institutes (29) and IIEST Shibpur.