Easy questions make up for harrowing wait

Updated on: Tuesday, May 03, 2011

When 11.18 lakh engineering aspirants walked back into their examination halls after recovering from the morning jolt of the AIEEE paper leak, they just wanted to end the tumultuous day on a brighter note. Fortunately for them, the undemanding questions made it easy. Most students said that physics questions were the toughest of the lot, but the mathematics section was a cakewalk. Summarising the paper, Ajay Antony, the head of a tutorial institute, said, “Among the three subjects, physics was quite difficult, chemistry was nominally difficult, and math was the easiest.”

Unlike last year, each of the three sections of this AIEEE edition had merely 30 questions - each carrying four marks for a correct answer and a penalty of a mark for a wrong one.

“The absence of multiple choice questions that carried eight marks definitely made this AIEEE paper one of the easiest till date,” said G Sridhar, managing director of a coaching centre. “In fact, quite a few students should have been able to complete the paper with 10 minutes to spare.

“Students who thoroughly studied their NCERT math book had an advantage since a few of its questions were repeated in the paper. The questions came evenly from the syllabus of the 11th and 12th standards.”

In the physics section, “The numerical questions were simple. But a few of the conceptual questions were challenging. There were three reasoning and assertion type questions,” said Narayan Desai, a physics teacher. Most students echoed Desai’s view. They said that there were no surprises in the paper and that most questions simply required the test-taker to solve the problem using one concept.

“Last year, there were more numerical questions, but this year almost all the questions were concept-based. There were no out-of-syllabus questions,” said Sonar Maruti S, a chemistry teacher at a coaching class.

More than 11 lakh candidates appeared on Sunday for AIEEE 2011, which was conducted in 1,670 centres across 86 Indian cities. Praveen Tyagi, the proprietor of another tutorial class, said, “Every student went through stress. Most of them gave the paper half-heartedly. The exam procedure needs to be strengthened and made more transparent.”

This year, 4,504 students took the AIEEE test on computers, a format they said was comfortable. “The paper was relatively easy; there was no glitch in the system,” said Anurag Pradhan.

Easy questions make up for harrowing wait

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