New Delhi, April 25
Embarrassed by a series of errors that marked the IIT-JEE 2010, directors of the prestigious institutes met in Kanpur today to figure out a strategy whereby the affected students could be convinced of immunity on account of problems in the question banks.

Held under the aegis of IIT, Kanpur, the meeting of seven IIT directors worked out a method to solve the problem. The method, however, is not final and will be discussed next week at a meeting of the Joint Admission Board (JAB) of the IITs, which comprises directors of the seven institutes and a top official representative, in charge of technical education in the Human Resources Development Ministry. The meeting will be held in Chennai.

Meanwhile, one of the directors today admitted that the errors reported in the question papers were discussed at length and a strategy mulled out to ensure the same did not negatively affect students. Though a re-examination so far looks a far option.

The directors’ meet follows an instruction from HRD Minister Kapil Sibal to IITs to find ways of dousing the apprehensions in the wake of JEE errors. In a recent report to the Ministry, IIT, Madras, admitted that errors had indeed occurred, following which the minister ordered a damage control exercise, of which today’s meeting was a part. He is likely to be apprised on the developments by the IITs.

Earlier, Sibal had asked IIT, Madras, to send a detailed report on question bank errors. The minister’s move came in the wake of a stern letter from Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who demanded a re-conduct of JEE due to instruction errors in Hindi version of the paper that left lakhs of students out of the IIT race.

As earlier reported by the Tribune, JEE 2010 assigned eight marks each to a certain set of questions in the English version.

The same set of questions in the Hindi version, was assigned three marks each, encouraging short-of-time students to opt for more lucrative questions that would fetch them more marks.

Further, the Optical Mark Reader answer sheets of JEE advised students to fill bubbles printed against math questions when the said bubbles were actually meant to fill in answers of the physics questions and vice versa. By the time the errors was traced and announcements made to rectify it, most students had already wrongly filled the bubbles.