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The students had no surprise element to complain about. Following the recent Supreme Court decision to implement 27 per cent quota for Other Backward Classes, all existing IITs will carry out the reservation in three phases, implementing nine per cent reservation this year, while the three new institutes in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan will implement 27 per cent at one go.

The IIT-JEE scores are used as a benchmark for admissions to the seven IITs located in Kharagpur, Kanpur, Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Roorkee and Guwahati. IT-BHU; ISM-Dhanbad; MERI-Kolkata and NIFFT-Ranchi are some other institutes which use the JEE scores.

IISERs in Pune and Kolkata and IIST-Thiruvananthapuram is on the extended merit list. As many as 3.2 lakh students — 70,000 more than the previous year — will vie for 4,500 general seats, as per current statistics.

The overall structure of the examination this year was the same as that of IIT-JEE-2007.

Co-ordinated by IIT Roorkee this year, the proposed pattern of JEE 2008 required students to take two papers for three hours each.

Aditya Kumar, who took a year off to write the entrance test this year, said: “The paper was too lengthy to solve and even the chemistry paper seemed a little tougher than usual.”

His friend Harish agreed and said that the Mathematics section was tougher and some of the problems were too long for the objective format.

“The mathematics paper was tough in both sessions. Questions were challenging but those who identified and omitted those questions stand to gain,” said Ajay Arora of Triumphant Institute of Management Education (TIME).

While in 2007, both papers contained 69 questions each, this year the mark distribution was different but the difference is too minor to affect students.

Experts also said that physical chemistry and modern physics sections were tougher than usual.

The cut-off for the mathematics paper is predicted to be much lower than usual.

Given that the system is about relative ranks there is not much scope for speculation.

Going by last year’s method, institutes such as TIME estimate the overall cut-off at 4 per cent which is a total of 167 marks.

Mathematics was the thorn in the flesh for the majority of students.

In physics, the questions were uniformly distributed and the linked-assertion types were difficult.

Experts say that IIT-JEE 2008 was more challenging thsan those in the previous years, and chemistry was the only really scoring section.

Another variation in the matrix match section will come as good news to students.

Previously students stood to lose all six marks even if the answer was partially right; in JEE-2008, students can get one mark if they get the answers correct in one row.

“The pattern was no different but the questions tested the genuine knowledge of subject. Students who will take the exam next year should study the basics thoroughly to face any twist,” Mr. Arora says.

While 28 per cent of the questions were straight objective type, 36 per cent were the linked comprehension type.

Ten per cent of the multiple choice questions had multiple answers and the matrix match type questions were missing from paper one.

Fifteen per cent was the assertion and reasoning type which tested the comprehension and conceptual knowledge of the student.

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