Students take OJEE at Capital Boys’ High School in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, May 8: The Orissa Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE), 2011, for admission into various engineering and medical colleges of the state, ended peacefully today in all the 158 examination centres across the country.

Around 75,000 students took the tests for entry into courses in engineering, medicine, architecture and pharmacy. Apart from 127 examination centres set up in the state, the entrance test was conducted at 31 centres in 14 cities across the country.

While the first sitting was conducted from 9am to 11am, the second sitting was from 2.30pm to 4.30pm. Within the state, about 58,000 students took the exams today. Coming out of the examination halls with smiles on their faces, the candidates termed the arrangements at the centre as ‘satisfactory’. “I was feeling a little nervous in the morning. But thankfully, the paper was not too difficult. I had sufficient time in hand to attend to most of the questions. I am expecting a good rank,” said Priyanka Parija, an aspirant.

At least 17,000 students took the test from other cities such as Delhi, Patna, Raipur, Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Kharagpur, Calcutta, Guwahati, Visakhapatnam, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Ahmedabad, said JEE sources. Owing to an overwhelming response, several candidates from other cities had to take the test in Bhubaneswar. Rupesh Kumar, who had come all the way from Patna with his friend, Nitesh Kumar, to appear in the test, said: “For the exam centre, we had chosen Patna and Ranchi as our top two preferences and Bhubaneswar as the third option. I think a lot of students must have applied for OJEE this year and they could not accommodate us in Patna or Ranchi.”

In the first phase of the OJEE on May 1, about 10,116 students had appeared for MBA and MCA exams. “The results are expected to be declared by May 25. We are preparing to start the counselling session in July,” said OJEE committee’s vice-chairman Sitaram Mohapatra.

Successful candidates would compete on the basis of their rankings for over 38,000 seats in engineering stream, 4,000 seats in MCA, 1,000 seats in pharmacy and 5,000 seats in MBA programmes among others. The entrance tests were also held to pick up students for admission into the 600 seats in MBBS and BDS courses in all the three government and three private medical colleges of the state.

The JEE authorities had pressed into duty 350 supervisors and 200 squads to ensure smooth conduct of the examination. “Everything was conducted smoothly and no untoward incident was reported from anywhere. We had all arrangements in place to ensure that aspirants and their guardians do not face any inconvenience,” Mohapatra said.