West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination

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West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination or the WB-JEE is a state-government controlled centralised test for admission to many private and governmental medical and engineering institutions in West Bengal. The test is taken after the 12th grade for admission to graduation (also known as Bachelors) courses. The exam can be taken by those who studied Pure Science stream in plus two level with the specific subjects tested in the examination, which are Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology. There are actually two separate tests for medical colleges and engineering colleges, the difference being that the medical test has the Biology paper while the engineering test has the Mathematics paper.

Every year approximately 3 lakh people take the examination and it is increasing. Students of both West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education and the central ISC board take the test, though it is dominated by the former. It's a prestigious test, and few students of science in West Bengal don't take at least one of the two tests. When someone refers to the Joint or the JEE in West Bengal, he is more likely to refer to the WBJEE than the IIT-JEE, which is simply referred to as IIT and is a much more famous, prestigious and difficult test.

From 2006, the WBJEE is going to contain only objective-type MCQ (Multiple Choice Question) type questions. This announcement has attracted mixed reactions with some applauding it as a step towards the future while others have said that opting for MCQ when other tests were slowly phasing out MCQ because of studies showing MCQ failed to properly judge aptitude is a folly.

The syllabus for WBJEE is intermediate between the elementary West Bengal Higher Secondary Examination taken by the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education and the advanced IIT-JEE.