Chennai: IIT JEE is the gateway for admission into the best engineering institutions of India. This year's entrance, conducted on Easter Sunday i.e. April 12, was comparatively easier than the previous years'. About 4 lakh students, including over 8,000 candidates from Tamil Nadu, appeared for the 2009 IIT JEE entrance. However, the initial anxiety of the candidates soon gave way to smiles, as both the morning and afternoon session papers were not too difficult to crack.
Shiv Kumar, Director of Career Launcher - a private coaching institute, said that in the JEE 2009, there was a qualitative change in the kind of questions, which did not require a lot of rigorous problem solving, rather a fairly good understanding of the concepts and the ability to comprehend and analyze. Therefore, an average student has chances to score almost equally in all three sections - Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. He also estimated that students with a score of above 150 would be able to find a place in the common merit list this year, although this cannot be said with certainty.
As per the figures revealed for IIT JEE 2008, the individual subject cut off mark for general category students was zero for Physics, 3 for Chemistry and 5 for Mathematics. These cut offs were determined on the basis that the top 80% candidates had qualified in each subject. Although the individual cut off marks were in single digits, in reality, the students who were admitted to the IITs had scored much higher. In the general category, the first ranked student secured an aggregate cut-off mark of 433, while the last ranked one had secured 180 marks. On the other hand, the last candidate admitted in the OBC category had secured 173 marks. The cut-off mark for the SC/ST students was 104.
