JEE goof-up leaves IIT aspirants in a tizzy

JEE goof-up leaves IIT aspirants in a tizzy

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: 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.

‘‘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.

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