Video Shows Australian Professors' Shock At IIT-JEE Entrance Exam Papers, Call It 'Impossible'

Every year, thousands of candidates take the Joint Entrance Examination, Advanced, considered to be one of the toughest entrance exams in India, conducted to screen students for admission to engineering courses in the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

It's a fact that in India, many students are drilled from their childhood to either take up engineering or MBBS, the coaching for which starts as early as in the eighth standard. This is no joke.

But how hard is the JEE? Well, let's just say, unimaginably so.

At least that's the sense you'll get after watching just how these Australian professors reacted to the JEE multiple choice papers.

An Australian vlogger named Toby, recently shared a video of professors from the University of Melbourne reacting to and analysing questions from the JEE papers.

In the very first go, one professor says that just by the face of it the paper looks extremely intimidating and that a lot of the questions are taught at an advanced stage at universities.

Prof. Barry Hughes from the University is flummoxed by the fact that the paper tests the students aptitude in Physics, Chemistry and Maths all in one go and that they are expected to score literally 1 mark every passing minute!

For the uninitiated, the JEE papers are Multiple Choice Question (MCQ)-based.

Take a look at the video below:

But the professors in the video slam this strategy and say that there's no one. way test a student's aptitude in any subject or for that matter his future as as scientist.

Prof. Barry Hughes says, "I had a look at a couple of the math section papers and I would say that I would be fairly challenginged to get a decent result in an hour. That's also because as an aspirational Mathematician I would rather tell a story while answering a problem,"

"The ability to reason and explain your reasoning is what matters in any scientific discipline. The JEE according to me is not an optimal selector. But with the race against clock style exams there's a trade off between a students ability in the subject and being trained to deal with it."

Dr. Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway, from the University of Melbourne also slammed the rote method and said, "Entry exams that are in drill format usually requires students to practice before making that grand attempt. When you have large number of students practice and time limited environment is not the determinant of how well the student will do in the next step of education."

An Indian-origin professor named Udaya Parampalli says, 'It looks really difficult, like the paper in Physics is something I might have been able to solve 30 years ago but not now.'

He adds, 'I think the mathematics questions are clever, it looks for the person's understanding of the matter."

Dr. Shane Huntington says that a lot of principles behind the paper rely on memorisation and recitation and that¡¯s a really bad education tool because it assumes that everyone has the exact same capabilities.

During the course of the video, the vlogger Tibees also gets the perspective of the exams from two Indian students who cleared JEE themselves. The two students urge IIT JEE aspirants to be absolutely fearless and face the exam with courage. One of them also asks the students to be absolutely sure and smart while attempting questions even a little bit of doubt can get a person off balance.

Around 12 to 14 lakh students appear for JEE Main and only around 2.2 lakh students are selected to appear for JEE Advanced. Ultimately, around 11,000 students make it to the top engineering colleges in India.

That's 14 lakh students memorising the same things, understanding the same patterns and getting into the course in pretty much the same way.

This is not in any way to belittle the hard work and effort that thousands of students put into it, but to understand and reason the method used to determine abilities.