IITs won't fix blunders in JEE question paper
On the basis of the model-answer sheet that was made public after the 2008 test, there were five major mistakes in maths questions, which could have cost a candidate 18 marks even if he had solved those problems correctly. Administrators did nothing on Prof. KD Joshi's shocking disclosure, as a difference of even one mark could have dramatically changed the ranks of the candidates, and the options that would have been available to them in terms of branches and institutes.
NEW DELHI: RTI applications of a computer science professor of IIT Kharagpur, Rajeev Kumar, might have forced a change in the procedure for determining cut-off marks in the JEE due to be held on April 12, but the administrators have remained silent on another serious deficiency pointed out by a mathematics professor of IIT Bombay, K D Joshi.
On the basis of the model-answer sheet that was made public after the 2008 test, Joshi wrote to the JEE administrators in August that there were five major mistakes in maths questions, which could have cost a candidate 18 marks even if he had solved those problems correctly.
Since the model answer sheet was disclosed after the admission process for 2008 had concluded, the administrators did nothing on Joshi's shocking disclosure, as a difference of even one mark could have dramatically changed the ranks of the candidates, and the options that would have been available to them in terms of branches and institutes. If a candidate lost 18 out of 161 marks for no fault of his, the wrong evaluation of those questions seems all the more unfair considering that the cut-off in maths in JEE 2008, as reported earlier in TOI, was no more than five marks and that somebody with just 10 marks in that subject could get admission into IIT Kharagpur.
Though the Joint Admission Board of JEE 2009 discussed Joshi's correspondence, as disclosed to TOI by its chairman Gautam Baruah, its information brochure gives no indication whether the model-answer sheet would be made public at least this time, immediately after the exam, so that any mistakes there could be corrected before the damage is done with the announcement of results.
Consider the five blunders in the maths papers of JEE 2008 exposed by Joshi, one of the senior faculty members of the IIT system:
Question 7 of Paper 1:
The accompanying instruction indicated that out of the four given choices, one or more could be correct and that the candidate would be given four marks for the complete correct answer or zero for an incomplete one. While the model answer sheet said that the complete correct answer was options B and D, Joshi discovered from his calculations that the correct answer was only D.
Though the Joint Admission Board of JEE 2009 discussed Joshi's correspondence, as disclosed to TOI by its chairman Gautam Baruah, its information brochure gives no indication whether the model-answer sheet would be made public at least this time, immediately after the exam, so that any mistakes there could be corrected before the damage is done with the announcement of results.
Consider the five blunders in the maths papers of JEE 2008 exposed by Joshi, one of the senior faculty members of the IIT system:
Question 7 of Paper 1:
The accompanying instruction indicated that out of the four given choices, one or more could be correct and that the candidate would be given four marks for the complete correct answer or zero for an incomplete one. While the model answer sheet said that the complete correct answer was options B and D, Joshi discovered from his calculations that the correct answer was only D.
Question 23 of Paper 1:
The instruction on the question paper said that ‘‘only one'' out of the four given choices was correct. This turned out to be misleading as the model sheet conceded that there were actually three correct answers. So, if a candidate rightly chose more than one correct option, the examiner was obliged not only to give him no marks but also penalize him by deducting one mark.
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