New Delhi: RTI applications of a computer science professor from IIT Kharagpur, Rajeev Kumar, might have forced a change in the procedure to determine 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 from IIT Bombay, K D Joshi.
On the basis of the model answer sheet that was made public after the 2008 exam, Joshi wrote to the JEE administrators in August, saying there were five major mistakes in the maths section which could have cost a candidate 18 marks even if he had solved those problems correctly.
Since the model answersheet was disclosed after the admission process for 2008 had concluded, the administrators did nothing on Joshi’s shocking disclosure as a difference of each 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 gave no indication whether the model answersheet would be made public at least this time immediately after the exam so that any mistakes that are there could be corrected even 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 answersheet said 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 “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.
Question 7 of Paper 2: Though the model answer was given as option A, Joshi found that the “complete correct answer” was missing from the four given choices. Since the question itself had a mistake, a candidate after doing his calculations might have avoided answering it lest he attracted negative marking for a wrong answer.
Question 17 of Paper 2: Joshi found that due to omission of plus/minus sign, the officially correct option was not the “complete solution.”
Question 21 of Paper 2: The official answer was that Statement A in Column I matched with Statement R in Column II. With detailed calculations and drawings, Joshi showed that there was actually no match for Statement A in the other column. The candidate who figured that out would have however lost three marks.
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