New Delhi: Around 10 lakh students on Sunday appeared in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) 2012 at 1,735 centres across the country.

Another 164,000 candidates would take the exam online May 7, 12, 19 and 26 at 221 centres.

The AIEEE 2012, conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education, was a three-hour long examination with four versions of question papers, each having 90 questions.

The exam had 30 multiple choice questions each from physics, chemistry and mathematics for total of 360.

According to Ajay Antony, vice president at T.I.M.E, a prominent tutorial for entrance examinations, "the level of difficulty for this year's AIEEE was down by as much as 10 percent from last year. The physics section was the toughest this year."

According to Gautam Puri, vice chairman and managing director of CL Educate Limited, another tutorial, "Anyone scoring 50 percent marks in the paper should secure an all-India rank in the vicinity of 15,000."

The AIEEE is a national level competitive test for admission to under-graduate engineering (B.Tech/B.E.) and architecture (B.Arch) courses in government and private institutes, including five Indian Institutes of Information Technology and 30 National Institutes of Technology (NITs). The institutes use the score obtained in the exam by an admission seeker as a criterion for offering them courses. IANS