The JEE is arguably one of the toughest entrance examinations in the world, with 60-70 students vying for the 5,000-odd seats on offer. The competition is so intense that many coaching institutes, and indeed entire towns like Kota, specialise in training people to pass this test. This is a trend that clearly worried the wise old men at IIT. "We are looking for innate analytical abilities rather than people who have access to, or the money for, an intensive system," says an IIT director.

The only way to do this is to keep varying the nature of the question papers in physics, chemistry and maths -- the three subjects that the JEE tests. This is where the problem of selection starts. The selection process has to make sure that students from even poor areas get to the short-listing stage and also has to take into account the random nature of questions and various ways in which students can be evaluated. Many JEE questions can be solved in more than one method.

For the past 10-12 years, the IITs have used a statistical method to come up with a list of students from which the main merit list is made -- depending on the number of seats available that year. The scores in each subject are accumulated in the form of a Bell Curve. The curve is called so because it looks like a bell and has all the average scores in the centre while exceptionally good and unusually bad scores are at the right and left extremities respectively.