Gender gap in Engineering streams is not new. More number of males are seen enrolling for these streams compared to females. In a developing country like India, the population is predominately young and this gap can make a large impact. Interestingly, a noticeable gender gap is also witnessed in students opting for medicine in India. The number of females opting to study medicine is higher compared to males. The large population also creates a surging demand for admissions into reputed institutes and these institutes are few in number, to make it an even ground for students to enter these institutes, National level examinations are conducted every year like the NEET and the AIEE. This present study looks at the statistical data from past five years of these National-level exams conducted for students interested to pursue medicine or engineering. These exams determine student’s admission into IIT’s and other reputed institutes. A significant and a constant gap was observed in gender. In a large democratic country, professional courses like engineering and medicine should not be exclusive for a single gender. Policies and further studies should be made to create these exams and courses gender inclusive

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Outbreak of COVID-19, online examination, and e-proctoring have caused more exam anxiety and affected exam performance among students’ studying in International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP). Therefore, the present research aimed to find effect of online test anxiety on academic performance of IBDP students in the subjects related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Study employed quantitative descriptive survey research design and administered survey questionnaire to 200 IB DP students who took online test during COVID-19 through convenient sampling technique. Sample included both first and final year DP students with due representation to boys and girls. Results of the study revealed a moderate negative correlation between online test anxiety and academic performance of IBDP students in STEM subjects. Regression analysis explained 14.1% variation in the STEM subject performance because of online exam anxiety under e-proctored condition. There exists a statistically significant difference between first and final year students’ online exam anxiety and STEM subject average grades. Future research may focus on conducting comfortable online examination methods with no additional exam anxieties. Keywords: International Baccalaureate (IB), Diploma Programme (DP), e-proctored test, virtual examination

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