The Joint Entrance Examination for admissions into the seven IITs, ISM Dhanbad and IT-BHU will be conducted on Sunday, April 13, 2008. To help students prepare for this challeging exam, rediff.com in collaboration with TIME (a national-level training organisation), will over the coming weeks present preparation tips and strategies along with expert chats. Kicking of the series, we take a look at the structure of the IIT JEE and the sectional allocation of marks.

In 2008, the JEE has retained the same overall structure of the examination as in 2007. The examination that is coordinated by IIT Roorkee this year, will be spread over a period of six hours. Paper 1 will be conducted from 9 am to 12 noon. Paper 2 will be conducted from 2 pm to 5 pm.

Both papers will consist of all the three subjects: Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. The JEE brochure has stopped short of detailing what will be the exact pattern / number of questions in JEE 2008.

However, it has been declared in the brochure that the JEE 2008 will give equal weightage for all three subjects. There will be separate sections for the three subjects in both the papers.

The subjects will have individual cut-offs and an aggregate mark cut-off too will be applied before the All India Ranks are declared.

At this juncture, it is nice to have a re-look at the 2007 paper since the overall structure remains the same. There were 22 questions in each subject in each paper, 81 marks per subject per paper and aggregate marks of 486.

This was the composition of JEE 2007 in a nutshell. There were four sections in each paper. The four different types of questions in these sections were Straight Objective Type, Assertion Reasoning Type, Linked Comprehension Type and Matrix-Match Type.

Except for the last section, each question in the first three sections attracted negative marking.

		No of Questions	Marks
Paper 1	Physics	22	81
	Chemistry	22	81
	Maths	22	81
Total Marks			243
		No of Questions	Marks
Paper 2	Physics	22	81
	Chemistry	22	81
	Maths	22	81
Total Marks			243
Overall Total marks			486

Now let's look at what kind of activities you should focus on during the last phase of your preparation.

If you are giving your Board examinations this year, make sure that you maximise the utilisation of time for JEE preparation along with your revision for Board exams even during the days immediately prior to the Board exams.  

That is, rather than looking at the question-answer type of revision for the Class X exams; you should look at it concept-wise in each area and try to cover as many concepts in one link itself.

For example, while revising the Mechanics area in Physics, do not look at the areas chapter-wise. Have the closed text book by your side, but try to flowchart the progress of the topics on a sheet of paper and recall all the equations and formulae. Complete this exercise for the group of chapters covering the Mechanics area and then only open the text book to see what you have missed out.

Make sure you spend enough time during the follow-up activity also. The follow-up is where you clearly identify "why" you missed out a link during the flow of concepts. For the Board examinations, you should be able to pull out any of the parts from this link and then frame your answers in your own words.

Ajay Antony is vice president, TIME. He has been involved in IIT-JEE training for several years. His subject area is Physics. TIME is a national-level training organisation with offices in 78 cities across India and is engaged in training students for various competitive entrance examinations. In December 2007, TIME created a new Guinness World Record for conducting the largest quiz in the world with Aqua Regia -- The Science Quiz.