For generations of Indians, who either due to parental pressure or self-imposed masochism yearned to attend IIT, the JEE was a rite of passage. I remember the time spent on log tables (calculators were not allowed in those dark ages), questions on projectiles and pulleys, calculating the rate of acceleration of blocks placed on other blocks, random questions on coin tosses (pun intended).
Parts of it were fun, parts of it sheer drudgery, and the most important thing of all was the cost imposed in terms of spending a one year plus of your life preparing for an exam that would have almost no relevance for what you want to do for the rest of your life. Some of those questions did call for creative and out of the box thinking, but creativity would have been far better cultivated by spending more time on things other than JEE prep. I wish we had an aptitude test for engineering instead of testing basic concepts in physics and math. The sad thing is that, I doubt whether the current testing would represent any improvement over the JEE. Remains to be seen!
