Students come out of an AIEEE centre in Patna on Sunday. Picture by Jai Prakash

Around one lakh aspirants literally wrote the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) on Sunday in Bihar and Jharkhand in the absence of the online test facility in the Central Board of Secondary Examination’s (CBSE’s) Patna region.

The examinees were happy over the comparatively easy papers. But it could lead to a tough contest for admission to the leading engineering institutes in the country.

The CBSE conducts the AIEEE examination online and offline. But the examinees of Bihar and Jharkhand, under the CBSE’s Patna region, did not have the privilege of taking the exam online.

The CBSE’s regional director, S.U. Sorte, said: “Online AIEEE was conducted for the second time but majority of the students in the Patna region opted for the offline test, as they are from rural background.”

Like the IIT-JEE examination, the physics paper of the AIEEE was tougher compared to mathematics and chemistry. But most of the examinees were happy with their overall show.

This year, the AIEEE comprised 90 questions, including 30 questions each from mathematics, physics and chemistry. Each question carried four marks. One mark would be deducted for every wrong answer. The exam was conducted from 9.30am to 12.30pm.

In mathematics, several problems were based on coordinate geometry. Some of the questions of all the three subjects were similar to the IIT-JEE papers of yesteryears. Students solving at least 15 years of IIT-JEE papers found the test easy because several questions were picked from them.

Anand Kumar of Super 30, an institution that imparts training to underprivileged students to crack the joint entrance examinations, said: “Based on the students’ feedback and after going through the AIEEE question paper, I found the pattern of questions this year similar to that of the previous year.”

Anand Jaiswal, the director of Mentors Eduserv, an institution imparting training to joint entrance examination aspirants, had a similar view. “The question paper was similar to previous years. Any student scoring 240 marks out of 360 will have a fair chance to figure among the top 10,000. Those scoring 325 could be among the top 100.”

Students having command on the Class XI and XII syllabus would have an edge in clinching good ranks in the AIEEE, said Kumar.

According to Kumar, there would be stiff competition among students for getting admission to top National Institute(s) of Technology because the papers were easy. Several examinees echoed him.

Abhiskek Pandey, who took the examination at DAV, BSEB, said physics would be the deciding factor since mathematics and chemistry papers were easy. “Students doing well in physics will have a fair chance of getting good rank,” Pandey said.