Technical glitches were reported from a few examination centres where the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) was conducted on Sunday.
The test is the gateway to engineering programmes in the Indian Institutes of Technology, National Institutes of Technology, and other Centrally funded technical institutions. Students who had qualified the JEE (Main) 2018 were eligible to take the test, conducted by IIT Kanpur this year.
Some candidates took to the micro-blogging website Twitter to complain that the servers were down during the exam. According to K.G. Vijayavargiya, the situation at the Peenya centre in Bengaluru was “horrible” because of network failure and power problems. “First paper still not finished. Second paper postponed to 4pm. How do you expect the student to give exams in such situations. Frequent power problems, network failure, lift got stuck,” he tweeted.
Many students said paper 2 was tougher than paper 1. Nithin Krishna, a student of Narayana Sindhubhavan College in Sahakarnagar, who had secured a JEE Mains all-India rank of 255, said: “I felt physics was easy in both paper 1 and 2 while math and chemistry were average in both papers. However, in the numerical section, we were required to give answers accurate up to two decimal places, which made it a bit difficult to quickly answer the questions. I don’t think the shift from written to online examination made much of a difference as we had been given adequate training at college.”
Another student, Aniruddha Latkar from Deeksha Centre for Learning, said: “The exam was fairly easy. The difficulty was pretty much similar to last year. I felt math was the easiest, physics, as expected, was a bit tricky, and chemistry was moderate. It was tougher than the previous year.”
