Around 76,500 students will appear for the exam this year, said Siddharth Dutta, chairman of West Bengal Board of Joint Entrance Examination. Nearly 1,10,000 had appeared for the exams last year.

Dutta claimed that the number of the examination centres has also dropped to 193. The state government decision to abolish most centres outside the state could also be held responsible for the reduced number of students attempting the exam.

The students will be competing for nearly 16,500 seats in government and private engineering colleges and 1105 seats in the medical and dental colleges in the state. The government has allowed only three external centers in Tripura. Meanwhile, the Joint Entrance Examination (to be held on April 20) will have a different pattern, consisting 80 per cent objective (multi ple choice questions) and 20 per cent short answer type questions.