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by sc00ter 4732 days ago
"six grueling hours of chemistry, physics, and math"

Otherwise known as three two-hour papers - hardly the stuff of legend! I'm not suggesting the papers are easy, just that by any measure, at this level the length is nothing remarkable.
2 comments
iamshs 4732 days ago
It is remarkable. It is a game of chess. You have to be in upper 4000 ranks to land a good engg. stream. And the ranks often have incredibly minor mark differences between them, which makes for harsher penalties in form of being denied good streams in good IITs. The mind games played in JEE is a game of chess. You only know the syllabus, and that's it. In my times, physics paper was easy and people scored a lot. It was Maths exam that made the difference. This is what makes the exam remarkable. And these iterations are there in every exam. I have given 3 hour exams in IIT in morning and evening...those were not grueling....but JEE was.
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sundae79 4732 days ago
Is there an equivalent of this? http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/awards/nobel.html Closest would be University of Madras not IIT.

Its just a numbers game, the universities are not even smart enough to increase seats in a country of 1.2 billion.

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mayanksinghal 4732 days ago
IITs have been increasing seats at a rate that is often unsustainable. During my stay at IITB from 2007-2012, I saw the number of undergraduate freshmen increase from about 500 to about 900. I think the largest issue has been scaling infrastructure and faculty.

And no, IITs don't have any nobel laureate to boast about, largely because of the lack of core sciences and graduate/post-graduate programs when compared to MIT/Stanford etc.

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ashray 4732 days ago
Since this is HN, I'd like to draw a parallel. Six gruelling hours of complex programming.

I think you can now appreciate the level of concentration that the exam requires because no question is easy. (well, to be fair, maybe 2-3% are..) So when you have to think really hard about each question, and think really fast to solve it, it becomes a bit tricky. I don't know if they have penalty marking now but before if you got a question wrong, you'd get a negative mark too!

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