Preparing for Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main can help students do well in the board exams as well but this is mainly true for those who attended coaching offline. 69 percent of students who attended offline JEE Main coaching said it helped them in their board exams as well. The corresponding figure for those who attended online coaching was 47 percent.
The right way to calculate JEE Main marks is;
Total Score = (Number of Correct Answers × 4) – (Number of Incorrect Answers × 1)
This edition of The Big Questions student survey, conducted by Careers360 sought to understand the impact of online or offline JEE coaching on students’ performance in entrance as well as board exams. It also sought to understand the cost and quality of online and offline coaching accessed by students. Over 1,500 students who wrote the national-level entrance test for engineering, JEE Main, responded; of them 1,514 stated they were currently enrolled in engineering colleges including Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), National Institutes of Technology (NIT) and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT).
Also Read | 76.8% IITians, 85.5% NITians Joined JEE Coaching In Class 11 Or Later
The survey questions covered the time and mode of joining JEE Main coaching, quality of study material, teaching quality, frequency of test, availability of faculty and more. As part of the survey, students were also asked which school board they got their Class 12 certificate from.
About 60 percent of the respondents who sat for JEE, said they graduated from schools affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE); 35 percent belonged to state-board schools; and the rest from schools affiliated to the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE). The NTA JEE Main is based on textbooks designed by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) prescribed for all CBSE schools. The vast majority of CBSE and CISCE schools are also private.
Also Read | JEE Main, NEET: Online Versus Offline Coaching
About 1,340 students revealed which board they graduated from. The distribution is given below.
Distribution of Respondents By School Board
The JEE Main and JEE Advanced are held just after the Class 12 board exams. Coaching appears to help CISCE students most albeit their number was the smallest in the survey. Most found offline coaching far more useful than online. The percentage of students finding online coaching useful hovered around 50 percent or below. Given below are the percentages of students who found coaching helpful for doing well in board exams, distributed by the board.
JEE Coaching Helps With Boards (in %)
Board | Online Coaching | Offline Coaching |
CBSE | 48 | 67 |
CISCE | 50 | 80 |
State Board | 45 | 71.3 |
Most IIT students who took the survey had answered the bulk of the questions.
The data gathered shows that most IIT, NIT and IIIT students come from a CBSE background. State boards are in the second position despite accounting for a far larger number of students and the private CISCE, with far fewer schools, is at third.
The distribution across the boards is roughly the same for all categories of institutions except the IIITs from which 122 students responded.
School Board And College
School Board | IIT (In %) | NIT (In %) | IIIT (In %) | Other Colleges (In %) |
CBSE | 60.1 | 58.6 | 48.4 | 60.6 |
CISCE (ICSE & ISC) | 5.4 | 6.8 | 8.2 | 6.0 |
State Board | 34.5 | 34.6 | 43.4 | 33.4 |
Of the 197 students who stated they had joined online coaching, 47 percent said the coaching had helped them in their board exams. But for the majority, 53 percent, it had not. However, in the case of offline coaching, the reverse was true. Of the total 354 students to join offline coaching, 69 percent said they helped them write the board exams.
Also Read | Under 70% BTech Graduates From New IITs Are Placed Each Year
A very small number of respondents answered questions on the quality of teaching, material, interaction with faculty at their coaching classes. The questions had multiple choice answers – each for a different level of satisfaction – from which a respondent could choose. The options included “satisfied”, “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied”, “dissatisfied” and “very dissatisfied”.
The percentage of students who felt satisfied with the quality of coaching – online or offline – is given below, based on the number of respondents for the question.
Students Satisfied With Coaching (In%)
It is evident from the survey that for some candidates, a single coaching programme is not enough. A few joined other coaching or short term courses. Among the respondents, about 28.2 percent of students who opted for offline coaching had joined other courses to prepare; while just 7.6 percent of the students who were preparing via online coaching required other sources.
On Question asked by student community
Here are the best engineering colleges for 35,000-50,000 rank in JEE Main 2026 examination -
No, JEE Main Answer Key for 2026 session 1 is not out yet. NTA will release the JEE answer key 2026 on February 4.
With 100 marks in JEE Main exam, you can apply for several IIITs depending upon the branch of the course. Candidates with 100 marks in JEE Main are likely to secure seat in IIITs like IIIT Manipur , IIIT Nagpur, IIIT Dharwad, IIIT Sri City , IIIT Trichy and other
With 77 marks in JEE Main, you can expect engineering colleges like NIT Mizoram, NIT Meghalaya , and NIT Arunachal Pradesh. Consider private colleges like GITAM, Lovely Professional University, SRM Institute of Science and Technology , Chandigarh University, and Amity University for better branch options.
Students with 68 marks in JEE Main examination can hardly get admission into top IITs and NITs like IIT Gandhinagar , IIT Bombay, NIT Kanpur , and more, although there are many other universities and colleges that accepts 68 marks in JEE Main for admission to Engineering programmes, some of
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