Lakhs of students in across India will be travelling to smaller districts to take the joint entrance exam (mains) scheduled for April 7. The JEE (main) in 25 cities across the country and three outside India will be conducted only on computers, which ironically, most engineering aspirants are reluctant to take. The computer-based test will be held from April 8 to April 25 and will be taken by 1.74 lakh students.

Students’ reluctance is primarily caused by bad precedents: earlier attempts at conducting computer-based tests were marred by glitches. An ambitious government-mandated plan aimed at holding a common admission test for all the business schools in the country in December 2011 had run into trouble at the test stage itself. The government wanted to reduce the number of entrance exams that students have to take in order to reduce stress among candidates and the duplication of effort, thereby reducing costs also. But the online trial for the first common management admission test (CMAT) had to be suspended.

The online exam for All India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) also faced similar technical glitches in May last year, at many centres.

In the first year of India's big step towards the 'one nation, one exam' system, 12.82 lakh high school graduates have applied to take the JEE to be held in 112 cities.

The two post popular centres of examination where largest number of aspirants will be taking exam will use paper-pencil mode. Patna will host the largest pool of students — 47,748 — on April 7 when the test will be held. Kanpur will host examination for over 43,000 candidates who may not necessarily hail from that city, but will travel from various parts of Uttar Pradesh.

From Delhi, most students will travel to Gurgaon and those from Hyderabad will go to Guntur. Those in Kolkata will travel to Varanasi where 38,000 students are taking the JEE (main) or Howrah which will host over 22,000 engineering aspirants. And the Mumbai-based candidates will be taking the test from an exam hall in Thane (23,000), Pune (42,000) or Amravati (25,000) or Aurangabad which will draw 17,500 students to its schools where the JEE will be held.

The officers in charge say that most students want to take the exam in the paper-pencil mode. But over time, that trend will change.

Apart from the IITs, National Institutes of Technology, the Delhi Technological University and other centrally-funded technical institutes (CFTIs), all colleges in Gujarat and Nagaland — the only two states to join the JEE (main) this year — will screen students based on a combination of scores from this exam and the class 12 marks. Only 1.5 lakh of the top rankers in the JEE (main) will be eligible to appear for the JEE (advanced) on June 2.

By next year, most other states are likely to be a part of the JEE (main) club.

India is home to 24 engineering entrance exams; most students take multiple exams. Of them, the AIEEE was taken by the largest pool of candidates (11.87 lakh) last year, followed by IIT-JEE, which was taken by 5.6 lakh aspirants.