IIT-JEE: Mistakes Leaves Aspirants Tizzy

It was a goof-up alright: while some students sweated through their IIT-JEE examination because the order of subjects on the question paper didn’t match the sequence on the answer sheet, others cracked the seeming teaser by figuring out that there was an obvious printer’s devil.

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.

Nearly 4.72 lakh candidates appeared for the IIT joint entrance exam (JEE) on April 11 this year. The exam, touted to be the most challenging in the country, held at 1,026 centres across the country with the results expected to be announced on May 26.

IITs will implement the last phase of 27% OBC reservation this year with approximately 10,000 total seats up for grabs in the new session. "There are around 4.72 lakh applicants for JEE this time as compared to 3.98 lakh candidates last year. We have 10,000 seats in 15 IITs, IT-BHU and ISM-Dhanbad this year," said Professor T S Natrajan, JEE chairperson, IIT Madras that is organizing the JEE this year.

The reservation for OBCs was first implemented in 2008 by increasing the total number of seats. The number of IITs has also increased to 15 since then. So of the total 10,000 seats this year, 27% will be reserved for OBC, 22.5% for SC/ST and also a few for persons with disabilities.

Now Coming Back On the paper‘‘I thought IITs were testing us on presence of mind. So I started marking the physics questions under the subject head ‘Physics’ on the ORS sheet,’’ said Vaibhav Bhise, who took the entrance test at IIT-Powai.

What complicated matters was that every subject had precisely 28 questions. As students across the country complained about the sequence of subjects not matching, the IIT authorities woke up to the gaffe and asked every exam centre to advise students to ignore the subject heads on the ORS sheets and go by the question numbers.

The JEE released an official statement saying there was a minor error in the order of printing of the subject headings.

Authorities sent out a clarification in quick time, but with the exam being conducted across 1,026 centres, it came in at different stages during the exam.

Piyush Kumar Sharma, a Delhi student, said, ‘‘In place of mathematics, physics was mentioned on answer sheet. But the questions were in the right serial order. The invigilators told us to ignore the subject headings and mark the answers in the ORS according to the question umbers in the paper.’’

‘‘In my centre, the invigilator first asked us to mark the answer according to the headings on the ORS sheet.But after an hour, the official communication from the IITs was read out, which was contrary to what the supervisor had instructed,’’ said Siddhant Deshpande, who took the exam in Navi Mumbai.

In one of the 10 codes of the Hindi version of Paper 1, a question was not printed. But according to JEE Madras, steps would be taken to make sure that the candidates’ score does not suffer.

Source:-TOI.