A year after 17 candidates secured a perfect score of 720 in revised NEET-UG results last year, the top score this year dropped to 686, with no candidate securing a full 720.
This year’s results featured a single topper, Mahesh Kumar from Rajasthan, who secured a percentile of 99.9999547. Utkarsh Awadhiya from Madhya Pradesh ranked second with a percentile of 99.9999095, going by the NEET-UG results declared by the National Testing Agency (NTA) on Saturday. The entrance exam for undergraduate medical courses was held under strict vigil in May.
With the top score being lower than the previous years, the NEET-UG cut-off has dropped this year. The cut-off for the general category was a marks range of 686-144, compared to 720-162 last year, and 720-137 in 2023.
The top score this year is also the lowest it has been from 2019 onwards, which is when the NTA began conducting NEET-UG. While the top scorers secured a full 720 both in the past two years and in 2020 and 2021, the highest score secured by a candidate in 2022 was 715, while it was a figure of 701 in 2019.
This year, a total of 73 candidates scored in the 651 to 686 range, the results show. Unlike previous years, the NTA has not released the scores secured by the top 50 candidates this year.
Last year, the initial results that the NTA declared in June had a set of 67 candidates who secured a full score of 720.
This fell to 61 after a retest was held for 1,563 candidates who were given grace marks for loss of time during the exam.
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Of the 67 candidates who had scored 720 in the results declared in June last year, 44 got a full score because they got the answer to a Physics question wrong and received grace marks since the answer they marked was based on an incorrect reference in an old class 12 NCERT science textbook. Results were then revised after the Supreme Court asked the NTA to treat only one of the options as the correct answer.
This year, a total of 22.09 lakh candidates appeared for the exam, down from 23.33 lakh last year. Of them, 12.37 lakh candidates qualified. More than half of those who appeared for the exam were female candidates, while 58% or 7.22 lakh candidates who qualified were female. Among the States, the highest number of candidates who qualified were from Uttar Pradesh (1,70,684), followed by Maharashtra (1,25,727), Rajasthan (1,19,865), Karnataka (83,582) and Bihar (80,954).
Of the top 20 candidates, four each were from Rajasthan and Delhi. After a paper leak last year, the conduct of NEET-UG was closely monitored by the Centre, the States and the district administrations this year, in line with the recommendations of a committee that the Ministry of Education constituted last year to suggest measures to conduct such public exams securely.
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