The IIT aspirants have been witnessing some changes in the JEE Main and Advanced eligibility, question pattern or marking scheme pretty much every year. Amid all the speculation about the exam in 2017, the guys at the Joint Admission Board (JAB) dropped yet another bomb, regarding the IIT-JEE 2018. The JEE Advanced is now mandatorily online! For the Main paper, however, the students have the liberty to choose the online or the offline mode. Now, this gives rise to the million-dollar question: should I opt JEE Main online or offline?
The best way to go about it is to weigh the pros and cons of both these modes of exams and make a well-informed decision.
JEE Main Online: Pros
With more than a million applicants of the exam every year, the decision of the JAB to go online is clear – introducing transparency in the evaluating process, eliminating the risks of paper leaks and reducing manual dependency.
The online mode works in the favor of students in the following manner:
- If you aim for the Advanced, taking the JEE Main online will be beneficial for you. You’ll get a ‘feel’ of the exam in the real-time environment. It will be a demo run for the more important examination.
- The best advantage of the online exam is that it gives you the chance to go back to any question in the paper and change your answer, without leaving any grossness on your paper. On the other hand, you have no scope to alter your answers on the OMR sheets.
- You need a good 10 minutes to bubble your answers on the OMR sheet. This implies you approximately lose 5.56% of your crucial time simply on marking answers. You can easily avoid this loss on online paper, where marking your answer is just a second’s mouse-click away.
- You might have surely encountered this problem: let us say you were trying to fill up a bubble for the option ‘B’ in question number 18. Instead, you ended up filling ‘B’ for question 19 or 17. Well, you aren’t alone. This is a very common problem. OMR sheets are prone to human error, whereas the online mode is devoid of any such error.
- Navigation through the entire question paper and tracking questions which are answered, unanswered and which need revision is very easy in the online mode. You can simply flag these questions as per your requirement. You’ll easily be able to revisit these questions due to the different color codes.
- BITSAT is another important exam for JEE aspirants, which is conducted in the online mode only. Much like the Advanced paper, you may get a practice of the online exam before taking BITSAT.
- As compared to the offline mode, the JEE Main online mode is cheaper.
- For JEE 2018, the dates for the online exam are April 15 and 16, which is a week later than the offline paper. Hence, you can add another week’s preparation if you opt for JEE Main online.
JEE Main Online: Cons
There are some cons of taking the exam online. Alternately, they are the primary benefits of the offline mode of examination.
- All these years, we have taken our academic examinations using pen and paper. We are accustomed to the offline mode of examination. For the same reason, you may not find the online exam ‘friendly’.
- In an offline mode, you have the access to the entire paper at any given point in time. You can view several questions on one sheet of the paper. When taking the paper on a computer, you can only view one question at a time.
- Although we’re moving towards a digital world, there’s always a chance of power cuts or connectivity issues in the online mode. This can become a cause of nervousness for a student.
Should I Opt for JEE Main Online or Offline?
Going by the discussions, it won’t be surprising if the IIT-JEE soon gets completely online. It is only a matter of time until you have the option to choose.
It can be concluded here that the online mode has a clear advantage over the offline. The only bottleneck is that the students are not used to it. However, you can readily overcome the anxiety or uncertainty by taking loads of online JEE mock tests which are available online. myPAT is one such channel – India’s largest online learning and assessment platform for JEE Main, JEE Advanced, and BITSAT. myPAT’s mock tests offer loads of main and concept questions, prepared by industry experts, which you can solve in a real test environment and get a command over the online mode of examination.
So what are you waiting for? The first mock test is absolutely free! Register here and get started on the journey to your dream IIT! Good luck and happy learning.