Friday 20 December 2013

JEE (main) online gets bigger, to be offered in 235 locations for 5 lakh candidates

NEW DELHI: Joint Entrance Examination (main) conducted by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) for admission to engineering/ architecture programmes could turn out to be the biggest online exam of the country surpassing Common Admission Test conducted by the Indian Institutes of Management.

CBSE is offering the online (computer-based exam) in 235 cities/ towns this year with a capacity of 5 lakh students in four days. Earlier it was known as AIEEE, which used to be the world's largest single day entrance test.

CBSE experimented with the online mode in 2011 when over 1.25 lakh candidates registered for online. In the second year the number increased to 1.75 lakh. More than 14 lakh aspirants are expected to register for the test. CAT conducts the online test for around 2 lakh candidates over a period of 20 days.

As per the plans, according to chairman of CBSE, Vineet Joshi, one out of every three urban centres will have an exam centre for the online mode of the JEE (main) 2014. "There are around 600 cities/ towns in the country. Since the offline exam is offered in just 85 locations, candidates need to travel long distance. In order to ensure that majority of the aspirants don't have to travel long distance, specially for female candidates it becomes a problem as they have to look for accommodation and security is also a concern, the Board is offering the option of taking the exam online exam in as many as 235 cities/ towns of the country. This is apart from the 85 cities/ towns which will have centres for offline (pen-paper) mode of the exam." The idea is to offer the exam as close to the candidates home as possible so that they can prepare well and given their best shot instead of worrying about logistics.

JEE (main) is conducted by CBSE for admission to National Institutes of Technology (NITs), Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), other centrally funded technical institutions (CFTIs), institutions under several participating State Governments and several other institutions. This exam is also the preliminary one from which the top 1.5 lakh candidates stand a chance to appear for the JEE (advanced), the entrance for the IITs.

Stating that the final aim is to completely turn it into an online exam, Joshi said: "Finally in the long-run we definitely want this to be an online exam."

In order to do away with the apprehension of taking the online test, the Board has also uploaded a real-time online mock test for practice so that aspirants can try it out before registering. "The online mock test will give the candidates the experience of the actual test. This will help them decide which mode they would prefer," said Joshi.

The registration for the exam started from November 15, 2013 and will continue till December 26, 2013. The offline exam is scheduled for April 6, 2014, the online (computer based) exams will be conducted on April 9, 11, 12 and 19. 

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