JEE Main 2015 Toughness Level: Using Shortcuts was the Trick

JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) Main 2015 exam is held every year for admission to undergraduate courses at IIITs, NITs and various other Centrally Funded Technical Institutions since 2013. This JEE (Main) has to be cleared by student so that they can go for JEE (Advanced) exam which is the final test to be cleared to get admission in IIT BE and B.Tech courses.

This year, JEE Main 2015 was conducted in offline mode on April 4, 2015. The question paper was divided into 3 sections of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. The overall difficulty level of the exam was ‘moderate’ – not too tough and not too easy.  

We have compared toughness of questions in all the three sections in detail. By going through these comparisons, a student can get the idea of their performance in the exam and can calculate their JEE Main rank roughly.

Toughness Level of Chemistry Section in JEE Main 2015

In Chemistry section, there were 30 questions. And each question carried 4 marks. Out of these, 4 were difficult (worth 16 marks, 13 were of medium level (worth 52 marks) and 13 were quite easy (worth 52 marks). It means questions of 104 marks could be solved easily with patience and concentration. Questions were 16 marks might have needed a little more time to solve them.

Toughness Level of Physics Section in JEE Main 2015

In this section, again there were 30 questions worth 4 marks each. In total, this section was worth 120 marks. Out of these, 9 questions (worth 36 questions) were easy to solve whereas, 15 questions (worth 60 marks) were of medium level and 6 questions (worth 36 marks) were very tough. Overall, Physics paper was difficult as compared to other sections. Also the entire section was tough and time-consuming as compared to last year paper as it mostly had numericals. There were just 5 theory-based questions this year.

Toughness Level of Mathematics Section in JEE Main 2015

This section is of 120 marks where there were 30 questions of 4 marks each. Questions were from Class XI and Class XII syllabus. Maximum number of questions was easy and 13 questions were of medium level whereas only 3 questions were tough. So overall Mathematics paper was easy as compared to 2014 paper of Mathematics.

Overall Toughness Level of JEE Main 2015

Taking all the sections, into account, we can say that overall, JEE Main 2015 April 4 question paper had:

As the JEE Main cutoff for JEE Advanced 2015 eligibility is expected to be around 114 for General category students (see the detailed paper analysis here), if students have just all the easy questions correctly across the sections (with no incorrect answers in the paper), they can rest easy about making it to JEE Advanced level.

The trick here was to use as many shortcuts as one knows to cut down on time one takes to solve Physics numerical and Math questions, and be an expert in time management. In Physics paper, one needed to attempt a few moderate-level questions too. Students who know when to move on to the next question would have fared better in this paper.