IIT-JEE threw up few surprises this year

Nearly 4.85 lakh students appeared for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admissions to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) on Sunday.

This year, candidates are vying for 9,600 seats at 15 IITs across the country. There has been a 6.5 per cent –– 30,000 students –– increase in the number of students appearing this year in comparison to last year.

While there were no significant surprises in the question paper pattern, many candidates told Deccan Herald that the papers were much easier than earlier years.

Manjula S, who took the examination at St Joseph’s Arts College, said: “Usually, everyone dreads the mathematics paper in JEE, since it is one of the toughest papers across all examinations. However, this year, the paper was easier than most years.”

Arjun K, who also appeared at St Joseph’s, said both mathematics and chemistry were easier than usual, while Physics proved to be tougher than last year’s paper.

This year, the examination was held in two sessions –– from 9 am to 12 noon and from 2 pm to 5 pm –– across 1,051 centres in 131 cities in the country.

BASE Director H S Nagaraja said: “Compared to previous years, this year’s papers were quite easy. What this means is that the cut-offs –– both subject-wise and aggregate –– would be much higher than last year.”

Gaurav  Goyal, Centre Head, FIIT-JEE Bangalore said this year’s pattern stuck largely to last year’s. “Paper I carried 36 pages with 69 questions, while last year there were 32 pages with 84 questions. Paper 2 carried 32 pages with 60 questions when compared to 32 pages with 57 questions last year,” he said.

The results will be declared on May 25. For the first time, students will get to see scanned answer sheets online after the results are declared. Model solutions of the paper will be put up on May 15, according to the IIT-JEE website.

Error in Math?

An erroneous question was reported by T.I.M.E.

According to a release, in Paper I, question no 54 (Paper Code: 0), was reportedly an error.

The question read: “ Let M& N be two 3 x 3 skew symmetric matrices .....”

But according to T.I.M.E, “a skew symmetric matrix of odd order is singular, and therefore the inverse does not exist.”