Even as students prepare for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) results that are scheduled to be declared on Friday, the answer keys uploaded by the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi recently, have caused a lot of anxiety.
The examination was conducted on April 8, and the answer keys to the question papers were declared after the evaluation of all the optical response sheets.
The scrutiny of the sheets has revealed that two questions were wrong and two more questions in the Physics paper had more than one correct answer.
The candidates, however, will be not be penalised for the error and out of the four questions, the wrong ones will carry zero marks while the students will not be given negative marking for the remaining two.
“The concern is the amount of time a student wastes on a question that is wrong or has multiple correct answers. Every mark matters a lot in the JEE because it can be the deciding mark,” R. Shekhar, a physics teacher in a private school in the city, said.
Students who took the test say they did find the questions confusing, particularly the physics ones.
“I spent a long time on the physics question because it could be interpreted in two ways to get two answers, and both were given as options. I skipped it later because I did not want to lose marks for marking the wrong answer,” said R. Chandraprakash, a student who took JEE 2012.
A senior IIT-Madras professor said the errors happened as questions papers cannot be peer reviewed in order to maintain secrecy, and cannot even be transferred online for scrutiny before the exam, due to security reasons.
Such errors are not an uncommon feature in the JEEs, but the institutes have always tried to compensate for them by awarding marks to the students, said R. Rajan, Student Mentor, FIIT- JEE.
The total marks have come down now, so this will affect the calculations of the students, he added. Last year, 12 free marks were awarded to students for erroneous questions.
Candidates will get to know their All India Ranks (AIR) / Category ranks on the IIT-JEE 2012 websites / SMS / IVRS on or after May 18, 2012.
