4 min readJun 23, 2026 02:14 PM IST
First published on: Jun 23, 2026 at 02:14 PM IST
The All IITs’ Placement Committee (AIPC) has instructed students to remove JEE ranks and percentiles, GATE scores, and similar entrance exam-related credentials from their CVs. These credentials may still be revealed if a recruiter asks. The directive merely reflects the IITs’ decision to avoid including these credentials within CVs forwarded through the IITs’ own placement offices. Two reasons are offered. One, such data might reveal clues about the student’s reserved or unreserved category status. Two, these credentials do not mean as much as cumulative grades or projects during the years spent earning the degree.
Considering the second reason, one can debate whether entrance exam-related credentials actually reflect an achievement worth displaying to recruiters. On one side of the debate, the credentials are the students’, and they remain free to reveal them, post them on personal webpages with links in their CVs, or even (if they wish) have them printed on shirts. On the other side of the debate, IITs have the right to say that their placement offices will only forward CVs which do not include certain information, and also that students remain free to look for jobs outside the placement office efforts.
The AIPC also says that IITs may henceforth be stricter with companies that make offers and withdraw them later. A courageous move, though one must wait and see how it plays out. If we debar a company from coming for placements to our IIT, are we assuming there are no other IITs that will host it, and that there are others which will take its place? If placements weaken in the coming times, will we be able to hold our position?
The diminishing returns of academic pedigree and the AI disruptor
Skill is well compensated only when it is both needed and scarce. With too many graduates, skills are no longer scarce. How much skill is needed is, unfortunately, also open to question. Most people are skilled enough for their jobs. College syllabi include advanced things that many jobs do not require. And now, with AI, the meaning of skill itself is being rapidly redefined.
In a recent sobering interview, Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran advised young Indians to consider acquiring trade skills, because such skills are resistant to being replaced by AI.
I have presented a few themes above that have captured some public attention. But this attention springs from a wider national concern about employment and employability. Whether placement offices should debar entrance exam-related credentials on CVs is a distraction. Whether IITs can meaningfully punish recruiters who renege on job offers remains to be seen. Whether Indian youth should run en masse from engineering to welding and carpentry is debatable, since it is unclear how many such people the country will employ at high wages.
The geopolitics of skill and the future of the engineering hand
There is another, more deductive view of employment and employability.
Rich countries have shrinking populations. If they remain wealthy (given that rich people use considerable ingenuity to remain rich), they will have work that needs doing. Their own children, few in number, will take the pleasant jobs in the middle, leaving work at two opposite ends for the less privileged children of others. At one end, there will be low-pay, low-prestige, low entry-barrier jobs, involving cleaning, unglamorous human services, or sustained labour. At the other end will be jobs that are dry, lower paying than banking and finance, requiring skills with a long learning curve, like science and engineering jobs. Many of those jobs might be sent to India.
How can we prepare our students for such jobs? What are engineering jobs that AI cannot do? Jobs that require skill with both computers and hands, travel to jobsites, human presence, unexpected connections between ideas, and situations where data is unavailable or confidential. These, more than entrance-exam ranks and offer-withdrawing recruiters, need to be thought about.
The writer is professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Kanpur, and author of Build and sustain a career in engineering. Views are personal
The AIPC also says that IITs may henceforth be stricter with companies that make offers and withdraw them later. A courageous move, though one must wait and see how it plays out. 
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