The competition cannot get tougher than this. The IIT � JEE held on Sunday, 12th of April saw around 4 lakh students appearing for this test. This figure has shown a 25% increase from the last year's figure of 3.25 lakh students. The no. if seats for which this test was conducted this year are approximately 8000 across 15 IIT's, IT � BHU and ISMUI.
Considering the increase in the no. of students appearing for IIT � JEE this year, the level of difficulty was relatively higher than previous years. Another important decision taken this year was to hike the relaxation for SC/ST's from 40% to 50% this year. This step was undertaken to ensure that there no SC/ST seats left vacant this year. This, incidentally, was the second IIT-JEE exam after the 27% OBC quota decision in premier higher education institutes was upheld by the SupremeCourt.
With 6 new IIT's last year and the two new ones, at Indore and Himachal Pradesh becoming operational this year with an expected intake of 120 students each, the overall no. of seats will see an increase with the second phase of the OBC reservation being implemented by IIT's this year.
IIT Kharagpur JEE chairman A N Samanta told ET, "The exact number of seats hasn't been decided yet, but the total number of seats available to students is expected to be close to the 8,000 mark this year. For the second phase of reservation, most of the IITs, barring IIT-Roorkee, will be increasing the number of seats by 18%." He added that the IIT-JEE examination had been conducted in more than 800 centres across the country.
The IIT � JEE like last year consisted of 2 papers of three hours each. The first paper comprised of 60 questions and 80 marks per subject with a total of 240 marks. The second paper had 57 questions with total marks amounting to 240. The maximum marks in both the papers combined were 480 against 489 last year. Maths was clearly the most difficult section, more so in the second paper, this year.
First-time aspirant Vatsal Shah said: "This year's paper was more difficult than the 2008 one. Also though the Matrix Match type had the most marks per question, it took more time as we had to go through a larger number of options." Both papers had sections on Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, each divided into four parts. Paper I had four sections: 8 questions on single answer type (straight objective), 4 questions of multiple answer type, 6 on linked comprehension and 2 from Matrix Match.
Paper 2, held between 2pm to 5pm, too had four sections: 4 questions on single correct answer, 5 questions on multiple correct answers, 2 questions on matrix match and 8 questions on finding a single digit integer as the correct answer.
The assertion and reasoning type of questions were done away with altogether this time. TIME course director (IIT-JEE training) Ajay Antony told ET, "According to us, this year's cut-offs are likely to be slightly lower than 2008, because of the level of difficulty of the paper. The minimum this year is likely to be around 35% overall for an all-India rank. That means the student needs to score about 168-170 out of a total of 480. Anybody who scores about 50% is likely to get an all-India rank within 2500. We've arrived at the figure by comparing the level of difficulty between the last few papers and also taking into account the total number of students appearing for the exam."
Career Launcher president and CEO Sharad Awasthi said: "From the first-cut analysis, I think scoring around 150 is likely to get a general category student a rank. Last year, the cut-off was around 172 out of 489 for a 7900 rank," he said.
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