Kerala - Kochi   

Rise in number of IIT hopefuls

KOCHI: Over 8,000 students in Kerala took the IIT-JEE, said to be one of the toughest technology undergraduate entrance tests in the world, on Sunday.

As tense parents waited outside the test halls in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Thrissur and Kozhikode, the students, mostly just out of school after writing the Plus Two examinations, battled with the six-hour, two-session exam. Hardly one out of every 100 students who took the test can hope to get into one of the seven Indian Institutes of Technology.

Over three lakh youngsters across the country competed for just about 3,000 seats on offer at the IITs, which are among the world’s top technology institutes.

Prof. S. Sankararaman, chairman, Joint Entrance Examination, Madras IIT Zone, told The Hindu that 8,770 students in Kerala had applied for the Joint Entrance Examination.

In each of the four centres in Kerala, there were four to eight test halls. The test consisted of objective-type questions in mathematics, physics and chemistry.

Many test-takers in Kochi said mathematics was the toughest part of the test. Most said they could not answer all the questions. Since wrong answers carried negative score, the students said, they attempted those questions the answers to which they were fairly confident about.

Many questions looked simple, but they turned out to be tricky while solving. An applicant is allowed to take the IIT-JEE only twice. There is a cut-off score for the test each year. Rarely does the JEE repeat a question that appeared in the past tests.

Supervisors said that the majority of the test-takers showed up grim and tense as this was perhaps the toughest test in their lives so far. Parents, who have invested huge amounts of money, time and care for years to enable their children to do well on the test this day, also appeared tense and anxious. However, there was a glimmer of hope among OBC parents: following the Supreme Court’s recent verdict okaying the 27 per cent reservation, their children have a better chance.

Officials said that this year there was a perceptible rise in the number of IIT-JEE applicants from Kerala.

This was because of the increased awareness of the test, rise in the number of coaching centres and the more user-friendly test pattern that was introduced last year.

In the past, Kerala students had not taken a keen interest in studying at the IITs. The intake of Kerala students at the IITs is likely to go up in the coming years, they said.

JEE test-takers usually spend years preparing and work hundreds of hours cracking the past questions. “It is not just your knowledge of mathematics, physics and chemistry that counts at the IIT-JEE, but the finer aspects of the theories and their application,” says C. Nandakumar, director, Talent Sindia, which coaches IIT aspirants.

He told The Hindu that at least two years of hard work was necessary to tackle the test successfully. To get into the IITs, he said, children needed to have a high degree of focus, a very good ability to comprehend and fine analytical capacity.

One of the disadvantages of the IIT admission system is that generally the city-based children of well-off and educated parents can do well on the test. Rural youths with no access to coaching centres and computers can hardly hope to make it. The OBC quota, a parent pointed out, can correct this bias to a small extent.

In the past, the huge majority of IIT graduates used to go overseas, especially the U.S., looking for lucrative jobs. Of course, they could raise India’s profile as a pool of technical talents.

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