One thing which is palpable in all exams apart from CAT is the lack of exam fever. In fact, across all centres in the country where JMET 2003 was conducted, the expectations from the exam were limited and the seriousness of writing an exam a la CAT was missing. However, JMET is written by many aspiring engineers trying to get into the portals of the prestigious IITs - for the MBA program these institutes offer.

JMET 2003 was very much on the expected lines with 4 sections and more importantly, without the dreaded General Awareness section. As has been put up on the IIT websites, the paper was for 150 questions with 1 mark for every correct answer and -1/4 for every wrong answer. Though the IIT websites did not mention the exact pattern (in terms of number of questions in each section), T.I.M.E. students would have been pleasantly surprised that the CT11428 was spot on - on the number of questions in various sections.

Pattern of JMET 2003

Number of Sections : 4
Marks for correct answer : 1
Marks for wrong answer : - 1/4
Total number of questions : 150
Total time allotted : 120 minutes

An ideal number of attempts in this paper would be close to 90 to 100 questions with a strike rate of about 80% to 85%.

Expected ranks for different score levels

Ranks	Net Marks
Top 100	70 +
100 - 500	65-70
500 - 1000	62-65

Analysis of the Paper

The general instructions did not specify whether there are cutoffs for individual sections. Since IITs gives ranks in JMET, it is expected that there would be no such cutoffs and maximizing the score would have been the top priority for students who had read the instructions carefully. Also, since the negative mark was -1/4 for every wrong answer and there were only 4 choices for every question, a student could have taken more chances guessing in this exam.

Section I - Verbal Communication

This was a very easy section. It consisted of 5 very simple sitters in the form of letter writing questions and another 9 easy fill-in-the-blank questions. The analogy questions also were easy for a student with good reading habits and/or with good vocabulary. However, the two RC passages, though of a short length, could have posed problems to some students answering the same. A good student would have attempted all of the 40 questions and a net score of 25 plus can be expected for a student in the top 100.

Section II - Logical Reasoning

This section had 6 questions on paragraph forming (verbal), 3 sets of very simple puzzles, 7 questions of Data Sufficiency and 9 questions of critical reasoning among other logical ability questions. The section as a whole can be termed as easy and a good student would have easily attempted 30 plus questions getting a net score of 22 to 24.

Section III - Quantitative Ability

This section proved to be a bouncer, a nasty one at that, to many a student. True to the expectation from the IITs, the section contained lots of pure math questions along with arithmetic ones and would have stumped quite a few. However, as has been mentioned earlier, the 'expected to perform equally in all sections' caveat was conspicuously absent and hence not scoring very high in this section may not come in way of getting a good rank in JMET. A very good student can expect to get about 10 plus marks in this section. But scoring around 6 to 7 would have been sufficient in a section as difficult as this.

Section IV - Data Interpretation

This section had 9 sets of questions. Each set with about 3 to 4 questions. Some of the easier sets were the ones on White-collar crime figures, BSE/NSE turnover, financial data on investment bankers and gap analysis (spider chart). However, since most of the graphs would have looked new to the student, a score of 15 plus in this section can be considered very good.