Bhubaneswar, April 3: The Joint Entrance Exam (Mains) of this year, scheduled to take place tomorrow, will see almost 50,000 candidates from the state.

In Odisha, the test would be held in Angul, Balasore, Berhampur, Bhawanipatna, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Jeypore, Rourkela and Sambalpur.

Officials from CBSE, which is conducting the test, said the number of candidates who had registered for the computer-based test, has seen an upward trend.

While there were about 2,000 students for the online exam last year, about 4,000 have opted for the online exam this time.

The online tests will be held on April 10 and April 11. The national-level test ranks will be used for BTech admissions in both central and state-level engineering colleges.

This year, apart from the JEE Mains, the state government will also be admitting students through the state-level Odisha JEE. Orissa High Court, on January 9, ordered the government to conduct the OJEE to fill up the vacancies left after admissions through the JEE Mains. The OJEE for BTech will be held on July 24 and results would be declared on July 27.

"Candidates who are appearing for their Class XII board exams this year are required to carry their hall ticket for intermediate exam to the JEE Mains exam too. Similarly, those who have passed their Class XII exams in 2013 or 2014 and are not appearing for improvement exams in 2015 are required to carry a copy of their intermediate marks sheet to the examination centre," said an official.

The admission criteria to undergraduate engineering programs at NITs, IIITs, other Centre- funded technical institutions, institutions funded by participating state governments and other institutions will include the performance in the Class-XII or equivalent qualifying examination and JEE (Mains).

The Paper-1 of JEE (Mains) will also be an eligibility test for the JEE (Advanced), which the candidate has to take if he or she aspires for admission to the undergraduate programmes offered by the IITs.

Odisha joined the JEE Mains last year.

This year, besides Odisha, the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Nagaland, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand have joined the JEE (Mains) system.