Students who took the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains 2019 on Wednesday for admission to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) across the nation felt it was difficult for them to crack the test due to lack of practice at the college level.
For the first time, the JEE Mains exam was conducted online. Candidates felt that this is the wrong time for conducting JEE as Class 12 students are busy with their preparatory exams and only a few days are left for the final exams.
"Currently, preparatory exams are going on. JEE is conducted in two attempts, scheduled in January and April. Though I am preparing for the school exams, I had to take it in the first attempt, since several competitive exams will be held in April," said a student.
Considering requests from candidates and teachers, the Ministry of Human Resource Development had introduced two attempts for JEE Mains. According to estimates, over 2 lakh students took the first attempt while around 12 lakh students are expected to appear in the second attempt in April.
Meanwhile, no technical glitches were reported in the online test. Candidates said that the paper was moderate.
“The Math part of the paper was lengthy. Physics and Chemistry section was mostly from the syllabus, with a few questions demanding critical thinking," Gagan Hegde from Deeksha Centre For Learning PU College said.
Another student, Rakshith Gowda from BASE institution, said, “The paper was moderate and there were a few questions from the previous year's question paper. There were no technical issues."
Experts too feel that the paper was not that difficult. Sarith Nair, General Manager, T.I.M.E. Bangalore, said, "The paper overall was assumed to be easy and not requiring undue pressure. The students also had the impression that questions from Physics were more theory-oriented (which is unlikely for a JEE exam) and questions from Mathematics required slightly more time to solve. Most students said Chemistry was the easiest subject. An average student attempting between 45 and 50 questions in a JEE Main paper makes us interpret the paper to be 'easy', but that does not score students heavily, as the NTA will be calculating percentiles based on each day's exam."
