New Delhi:A record 56 candidates, including two females, achieved 100 NTA score in engineering entrance exam JEE-Main, the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced on Wednesday night.
The qualifying percentile for JEE (Advanced), the entrance test for admission to the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), touched a five-year high.
While 23 candidates in the JEE (Main) January session scored 100 NTA score, 33 candidates in the April session achieved it.
The 56 toppers include 40 from the general category, 10 from the OBC category and six from the gen-EWS category. No candidate from the SC and ST categories managed to get 100 NTA score this year.
According to officials, the NTA score is not the same as the percentage of marks obtained.
“NTA scores are normalised scores across multi-session papers and are based on the relative performance of all those who appeared for the examination in one session. The marks obtained are converted into a scale ranging from 100 to 0 for each session of examinees,” a senior NTA official explained.
The official further said that 39 candidates were debarred from taking JEE-Main for three years for using unfair means during the exam.
Candidates’ ranks are released taking into consideration the best of the two NTA scores in accordance with the policy already in place.
With 15 candidates in the top scorer list, Telangana continues to lead state-wise for the third consecutive year.
Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, with seven candidates each with 100 percentile, came a distant second, followed by Delhi with six aspirants in the top scorer list.
Of the 14.1 lakh candidates, almost 96 per cent of the aspirants took the test for undergraduate admissions to engineering and architecture programmes in centrally-funded technical institutions as well to qualify to appear for JEE (Advanced). There are around 24,000 seats across National Institutes of Technology (NITs).
The examination was conducted in 13 languages (Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu) across 571 centres in 319 cities, including 22 outside India (Cape Town, Doha, Dubai, Manama, Oslo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos/Abuja, Jakarta, Vienna, Moscow, and Washington D.C, among others).
The qualifying percentile for JEE (Advanced) touched a five-year high across categories. The minimum cut-off for the general category this year is 93.2, up from 90.7 in 2023 and 88.4 in 2022. The cut-off for general-EWS this year is 81.3, up from 75.6 last year and 63.1 in 2022.
Similarly, the qualifying percentile for the OBC category has risen to 79.6 from 68 in 2022 and 73.6 in 2023. The biggest jump in the qualifying score has been for the SC and ST categories, with SCs’ percentile touching 60, up from 51.9 in 2023 and 43 in 2022 and that for STs touching 46.6, up from 37.2 in 2023 and 26.7 in 2022.
This year, 2,50,284 candidates qualified for the JEE (Advanced), with the maximum number of successful candidates coming from Uttar Pradesh, followed by Maharashtra and Telangana.
In 2023, 2,51,673 JEE (Main) candidates had qualified to appear for JEE (Advanced).
Registration for JEE (Advanced) will commence from April 27 and these aspirants will compete for around 17,385 undergraduate seats across the IITs.