IITs kick off major Chaos Theory Research Programme with IIT JEE 2010

The IITs (Indian Institute of Technology) which conduct their Joint Entrance Exam annually, have introduced a surprise new evaluation method in the papers this year. Almost 4.7 lakh students across the country appeared for the exam this Sunday and they were stumped to find that the OMR (Optical Magnetic Resonance) sheet on which the answers had to be marked were ordered differently from the question paper and each section on the OMR sheet had different number of questions from the corresponding sections in the question paper.

This seeming lapse led to a lot of chaos and confusion at the exam centres which prompted the IIT authorities to issue a quick response. “Please carry on with the test, there is no mistake in the papers. Students are advised to mark the answers as they see fit” was the message conveyed across the 1,026 centres across the country.

“It was a nightmare! I saw that the sections were ordered differently in the answer sheet and I was very happy that I noticed this early and started marking the Chemistry answers under the Chemistry section till I found out the number of questions in each of the answer paper sections did not match any of the sections in the question paper!’ said a distraught student who was in tears after centre officials refused to be of any help.

“This was completely intentional. The JEE Committee had taken this decision right at the outset, before deciding anything else about this years question paper” said Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal, who was the chairperson at a meeting held with the JEE Committee in August last year.

T.S. Natarajan, Organising Chairman of the JEE 2010 said, “This is a part of our ongoing research efforts into Chaos Theory. As we are the premier technological institutions of the country, we wanted to make significant advances towards a better understanding of the underlying basis of Chaos Theory and its effects. We are quite pleased about having being able to create Chaos on such a wide scale and evaluating the students responses to such chaos will give path breaking insights into Chaos Theory”

He also added, “Plus, it will be beneficial for the students to get an exposure to Chaos Theory even before they start their engineering degrees, considering how important the theory is turning out to be in the modern scientific world”.

When asked about how this would affect student scores in the examination, Prof Natarajan said, “We have quite robust algorithms to deal with chaos and though they might not be completely suited for chaos of such magnitude, we feel that the advancement of science is much more important than a few marks here and there. I am sure the young to-be-engineers of the country will entirely understand.”

There are rumours that coaching institutes in Kota knew about this application of Chaos Theory and they managed to get themselves banned, thus giving the students of their institutes a better exposure at chaos as they had to hurriedly leave for randomly scattered centres across the country.