[iamshs]

It is remarkable. It is a game of chess. You have to be in upper 4000 ranks to land a good engg. stream. And the ranks often have incredibly minor mark differences between them, which makes for harsher penalties in form of being denied good streams in good IITs. The mind games played in JEE is a game of chess. You only know the syllabus, and that's it. In my times, physics paper was easy and people scored a lot. It was Maths exam that made the difference. This is what makes the exam remarkable. And these iterations are there in every exam. I have given 3 hour exams in IIT in morning and evening...those were not grueling....but JEE was.

[sundae79]

Is there an equivalent of this? http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/awards/nobel.html Closest would be University of Madras not IIT.

Its just a numbers game, the universities are not even smart enough to increase seats in a country of 1.2 billion.

[mayanksinghal]

IITs have been increasing seats at a rate that is often unsustainable. During my stay at IITB from 2007-2012, I saw the number of undergraduate freshmen increase from about 500 to about 900. I think the largest issue has been scaling infrastructure and faculty.

And no, IITs don't have any nobel laureate to boast about, largely because of the lack of core sciences and graduate/post-graduate programs when compared to MIT/Stanford etc.