Chennai: Many students who appeared for Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) found the paper-II of the entrance test was very tough this year.
Over 1.5 lakh students wrote the entrance exam from 500 centres around the country on Sunday.
IIT Madras, which organised the exam, is serving as gateway to the prestigious IITs. For the first time, Aadhaar cards were used for verification. Students who showed other ID cards were also allowed to write the exam.
Each paper, paper-1 and 2 carried a maximum of 183 marks. A student can score a maximum of 366 marks in the exam. In paper 1, match the following had three columns instead of usual two.
Pranav Ramakrishnan one of the toppers in JEE (Main) exam said, “Paper-1 exam was quite easy this year. Paper-II had many twisted questions and was very difficult to answer.”
Another student Harish said physics part in paper-II was very tough. He also found the paper-1 as moderate. Muthamilselvam, a parent from Chennai said, “My son has prepared for both IIT and BITS entrance tests. Hopefully, he’ll crack the tests”.
“Overall the difficulty level is the same as compared to last year. So, the cut-off also would be the same as last year,” said Anand Nagarajan, academic head for the school division, TIME, Chennai.
Last year, the general category cut-off for JEE (Advanced) is 75 of 372 marks. This year also the cut-off will remain more or less the same. Students, who scored 50 per cent marks, featured in the top 1,000.
“In the first paper, many students are confident they would score more than 60 per cent marks. But in the second paper, a few students alone can attend more than 25 per cent questions,” he said. Of the candidates, the top 36,000 candidates can only qualify for admission. There are 11,000 seats available in the 23 IITs all over the country.
For the first time, 500 foreign students took the exam from six countries namely Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Dhaka (Bangladesh, Dubai (UAE), Kathmandu (Nepal) and Singapore.
