More than 3,000 from Tamil Nadu to take JEE (Advanced)

CHENNAI: Around 1.5 lakh students, including 3,198 from Tamil Nadu, are set to take the JEE (Advanced) exam on Sunday. The scores of the exam will determine admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology and a few other premier technical institutions. 

Students are working day and night even after their board exams, but are not willing to leave anything to chance. Many have a back-up plan. "A lot of them have taken entrance tests conducted by several deemed universities and other private universities. Those who are a little doubtful have even paid the registration amount to book their seat," said Aakash Chaudhary, director of Aakash Educational Services. 

Sources said only 1.28 lakh of the 1.5 lakh who qualified for the test have applied as they feel the competition is too tough. 

Sriram Balakrishnan (name changed), who will be taking the test on Sunday, said, "I have paid the registration fee in a city engineering college. I have prepared well, but by the time we get the results it may be too late to get an EEE BTech seat in the college." SRM University, which started its admission process on Saturday, allowed parents of students preparing for JEE to attend counselling in their place. 

Mithun Balaji, who has been training at coaching institute TIME, said he had written the entrance tests for VIT University, SRM University and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, but that he was too busy preparing for the test that he could not attend the counseling. He hopes to make it to IIT-Madras or one of the NITs, for which he has already qualified. 

JEE (Advanced) will have two objective type papers. Each paper will consist of physics, chemistry and mathematics. Admissions to the IITs will be based on category-wise all India rank in JEE (Advanced), subject to the condition that the candidates are in the top 20 percentile of successful candidates of their boards.