It seems entrance examinations in India and glitches go hand in hand. While the CAT exams were marred by technical snags, the printing error in IIT-JEE paper left IIT aspirants in a tizzy.
More than 4.72 lakh students appeared for IIT-Joint Entrance Exams on April 11th to compete for 10,000 seats in prestigious IITs. There were 82,000 more number of candidates who took the test than compared to the last year. However, there were several goof ups which left students confused. The order of subjects on the question paper did n’t match the sequence on the answers sheets. While the question paper had the first 28 questions from physics, followed by an equal number of questions from chemistry and maths, the ORS sheet (objective response sheet) had a different sequence of subjects. This confusion added to students’ woes, and it was only after assurance given by IIT authorities that all is well and that students need to ignore the subject heads on the ORS sheets and go by the question numbers that students resumed with answering their papers. If this initial confusion was not enough, lengthy and tricky questions in mathematics gave a tough time to students. Integer type questions in Mathematics were tough. For the first time, log and anti-log were given in two pages of the paper.
Experts at Aakash Educational Services Ltd have predicted the cut offs for different subjects as: Physics (paper – I: 35 marks and paper – II: 25 marks), Chemistry (paper – I: 25 marks and paper – II: 20 marks) and Maths (paper – I: 20 marks and paper – II: 20 Marks).Various institutes like TIME , FIITJEE etc are predicting over all cut-offs for this year in the range in the range 155 – 175 out of 489.
Now, that the entrance test is over, it is time to speculate whether the current selection process a fool-proof one? Akash Chaudhry, director of Aakash Educational Services Ltd, believes that the current system adapted by IIT-JEE is one of the best, but there is some scope of improvement. He believes an aptitude test and a provision of an interview can ensure that brightest students make it to IITs.
However, one should remember that even if you failed to make it to IITs, there is always a next time. One should never give up and remember failure is a stepping stone to success.
Read the full article: Printing errors and mathematics leave IIT aspirants in a tizzy; experts vary on Cutoffs