Twenty four candidates, including two women, scored 100 percentile in the engineering entrance exam Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) (Main) declared by the National Testing Agency (NTA) on Monday.
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana contributed the maximum number of toppers with five each, followed by four from Rajasthan and two from Uttar Pradesh.
Eighteen of the toppers are from General Category, four from Other Backward Classes and two from Economically Weaker Section.
However, many students have demanded that they be given another attempt because of technical glitches on the day of the exam, mix-up in response sheets as well as students getting lower percentile despite better scores than their peers who appeared in the same session of JEE MAIN. The National Student’s Union of India, the student’s wing of the Congress, also held a protest in Delhi to highlight these issues.
“My son got 97.86 percentile with 184 marks out of a total of 296 marks on July 26, while another student who appeared for the exam on July 25 got 98.01 percentile with 152 marks. The NTA says that it normalises marks, still it is not possible that a student with 32 more marks gets a lower percentile,” said Mr. Gautam Biswas. He said that another of his son’s peers scored 99.45 percentile in session 1 when NTA declared the results, but when results were announced on Monday containing the best of session 1 and session 2, his marksheet said he did not appear for session 1 and scored 99.1 percentile in session 2. “As a result, instead of a rank of 5,000 he now has a rank of 8,100,” explained Mr. Biswas.
The JEE (Main) for Paper 1 for Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Technology was conducted in two sessions between June 24-30 and July 25-30. Students have the option to appear in both the sessions. The NTA considers the best of the two scores while announcing the result.
Another student, Manas Verma, told The Hindu that he scored 132 marks and got 94 percentile in session 2, while another student he knew scored 184 marks and got 54 percentile in the same session and even if one accounted for different difficulty levels such a huge gap was inexplicable.
“Students with poor scores have got good percentile despite paper being tough or vice versa. This doesn’t make sense. There has also been a mix-up of response sheets where some say they have received two different response sheets. Students have nowhere to go to with their grievances,” said Mr. Biswas.
