JEE Main Help Line – Helpful or Clueless?

With the announcement of JEE Main 2018 application form on December 1, there started a flurry of activity amongst all engineering aspirants who will be appearing for the entrance exam on April 4, 15 or 16. With the JEE Main application, came in a lot of queries from students. Doubts were expressed about eligibility, dates, filling the application form and more. This is still an on-going process as the exam caters to more than 12 lakh students. CBSE has put up some help line numbers that students should use to ask their queries. There is also an Email Id given for this purpose. The big question is – Is this Helpline really helpful or helpless?

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First let’s take a look at the phone lines. There are four numbers given on the website - 7042399520, 7042399521, 7042399525, and 7042399526. Well the phone lines like every year are inaccessible.  Many students have written that they have tried calling the helplines but they cannot reach them. So we at Careers360 tried calling the contact numbers given for JEE Main 2018 and they were perpetually either busy or not reachable. How can the helpline be helpful if it can’t be reached?

Next comes the JEE Main Email ID for any queries – [email protected] In the first week of December, there was no response to any of the queries. However since the past week there have been responses from the helpline (email). However the kind of responses raises serious questions about the people manning and monitoring the emails.

The first email we had written was about the “Remove the image discrepancy facility”. The facility is now available but students cannot get the link to work. Calls to CBSE as usual couldn’t get through. So we wrote to CBSE asking for a clarification. The reply came back that the facility would only work for students who have been sent messages regarding any discrepancies in their photograph. In case of no such message candidates could still write to CBSE with their application number and the correct images. Candidates still reported that they couldn’t and many who had discrepancies did not receive messages from CBSE.  So we advised all of them to email. However the big question here is -why allow a facility when it is not meant to work? 

One frequently asked query is about eligibility considering the improvement and number of subjects. Here we had written in the first week of December to CBSE and there was no reply. Undeterred, we wrote again. This time the responses to the queries were so unbelievable that questions come to mind as to whether CBSE has seriously provided a help line or a clueless line.

Check the screen shots given below. However it must be said that after we persevered, we finally got the answer to the question in some fashion.

We asked a question

We got this ridiculous response

Then we wrote back again

We got another ridiculous answer

We wrote again

We finally got the correct answer

While CBSE did finally give the correct answer, the question still remains as to who monitors these help lines and how? The responses to the questions are seriously condensing in nature more so because it means that the query was not truly read.  If this is the state of helplines can students really rely on them? Given the state of affairs, it seems more like the helplines are clueless than helpful.