The “corrective measures” evoked sharp criticism from students and teachers as they failed to address the real issues that would damage the prospects of merit students getting selected to premier IITs. “The directors of seven old IITs have ignored the biggest error that they made in Section II of Paper-I and Section-IV of Paper-II. In these sections, any student can easily score around 93 marks by darkening all the circles to answer particular questions as there was no negative marking for wrong answers,” said Mr M.V. Ramana Rao, a IIT-JEE trainer.
Nearly 50,000 students from the state appeared for IIT-JEE 2010 out of a total of about 4.72 lakh who took the exam across the country. Students from AP have been bagging a major chunk of seats for the last five years.
“The real issue is that candidates wasted valuable time due to the mistakes in the question papers. This issue has not been addressed,” said Mr Raghunath, senior IIT-JEE faculty at the Narayana group.
Students who took the exam in Hindi said they took six questions lightly as these questions were wrongly shown as carrying three marks each when actually they were worth eight marks each.
“Though the corrective measures stated that they will be evaluated for eight marks, it will be useful for only those who attempted these questions. Several of my friends ignored them as they felt that it was not worth spending time just to gain three marks. Instead, they focused on questions which carried more marks. How will the corrective measures do justice to such students?” asked Mr Vikas Agarwal, an IIT aspirant.
“The corrective measures announced will do no justice to the affected candidates. There is no other solution except to conduct a fresh exam,” said Mr Anand Krishna, a parent, who is planning to file a legal case against IIT-Madras, which conducted the IIT-JEE.