The D-Day for engineering aspirants who want to take the prestigious entrance exam for admission into the much sought after Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT’s) in the country for the academic session commencing 2014 is finally here.

Under the current format, the first phase of the two-tier joint entrance examination, known as JEE-Main is scheduled to be held on April 6 offline and on April 9, April 11, April 12 and April 19 online. As per the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), more than 14 lakh students are taking the exam including 50,000 from Kota alone.

The exam centres for the JEE Main 2014 in pen & paper mode are Kota, Jaipur, Udaipur, Ajmer, Bikaner and Jodhpur, while the online test will be held at all offline centres along with Alwar, Bharatpur and Sikar.

The results of the JEE (main) are expected to be declared on May 2. Among the total aspirants, the top 1.5 lakh students in all categories across the country will be legible to appear in the JEE Advanced.

The JEE main will be conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) while the later stage JEE Advanced for admissions into various IITs will be held by IITs on May 25 in two shifts for both offline and online modes.

The JEE merit list will be prepared on the basis of the candidates’ class XII Board marks and the marks scored in JEE. For admissions to Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), marks scored by a candidate in school board/ equivalent examination will carry 40 percent weightage and the JEE scores will carry 60 percent weightage.

Admission cards for the first leg can be downloaded from JEE website. The lucky top 1.5 lakh students have to register for JEE Advanced on the JEE website from May 4 to May 9.

15 IIT’s & other prestigious institutes

The country has 15 IITs with a total of 9,885 seats. These are: IIT-Bhubaneshwar, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Delhi, IIT-Gandhinagar, IIT-Guwahati, IIT-Hyderabad, IIT-Indore, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Kharagpur, IIT-Madras, IIT-Mandi, IIT-Patna, IIT-Rajasthan, IIT-Roorkee and IIT-Ropar.

In addition, 30 National Institute of Technology, nine IIITs, 14 Centrally funded institutes, 32 self-financing institutes which have a total of over 27,000 seats and various engineering colleges in 15 states will admit candidates.

Institutes enrolling students on the basis of JEE Main scores include Delhi College of Engineering, NSIT Delhi, PEC Chandigarh, IIIT Hyderabad, Dherubhai Ambani Institute of Technology in Ahmedabad, Thapar Engineering College in Patiala, NIRMA in Ahmedabad and LMNIT in Jaipur.

Colleges like IISER in Pune and Mohali and Rajiv Gandhi Institute Petroleum and Technology in Raebraily and IIS Bangalore and IIST Tiruvanantapuram grant admissions on the basis of of JEE-Advanced scores.