[sc00ter]

"six grueling hours of chemistry, physics, and math"

Otherwise known as three two-hour papers - hardly the stuff of legend! I'm not suggesting the papers are easy, just that by any measure, at this level the length is nothing remarkable.

[iamshs]

It is remarkable. It is a game of chess. You have to be in upper 4000 ranks to land a good engg. stream. And the ranks often have incredibly minor mark differences between them, which makes for harsher penalties in form of being denied good streams in good IITs. The mind games played in JEE is a game of chess. You only know the syllabus, and that's it. In my times, physics paper was easy and people scored a lot. It was Maths exam that made the difference. This is what makes the exam remarkable. And these iterations are there in every exam. I have given 3 hour exams in IIT in morning and evening...those were not grueling....but JEE was.

[sundae79]

Is there an equivalent of this? http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/awards/nobel.html Closest would be University of Madras not IIT.

Its just a numbers game, the universities are not even smart enough to increase seats in a country of 1.2 billion.

[ashray]

Since this is HN, I'd like to draw a parallel. Six gruelling hours of complex programming.

I think you can now appreciate the level of concentration that the exam requires because no question is easy. (well, to be fair, maybe 2-3% are..) So when you have to think really hard about each question, and think really fast to solve it, it becomes a bit tricky. I don't know if they have penalty marking now but before if you got a question wrong, you'd get a negative mark too!