— Biplob Das Even a week after the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced the outcome of JEE Main, candidates continue to allege there were several technical glitches and errors in the results, with many now approaching the court for relief. For the past week, students have also been taking to social media to flag complaints regarding the overnight changes in final scores, errors in application numbers, and candidates being marked absent despite claiming to have appeared in the exams. Among them is Vishal Narayan Singh, whose brother appeared for both attempts of JEE Mains from a centre in Gaya, Bihar. Singh claims that when they downloaded the response sheet for the first attempt, released on July 3, the raw score was 177. Yet on July 12, when the final result for the first session was released, Vishal and his brother were stunned to find that the latter’s percentile was only 58. “When the response sheet was released for the first attempt, my brother’s raw score was 177 out of 300, but when the results came finally, his percentile was 58, which is impossible for the raw score he got. If any candidate gets even 99 or 100 as their raw score in any shift of JEE Mains, their percentile is almost always above 87,” remarked Singh. He said at the time they thought these glitches would not reappear in the second session, which was due on July 24. However, this did not turn out to be the case for his brother. “My brother had attempted 64 questions in the second session. When the response sheet for the second session was released, it showed that my brother attempted zero questions. The NTA is saying that my brother must have selected and deselected all the questions, but that was not the case at all,” he added. On August 6, Singh went to the NTA office in Okhla, Delhi, with his complaints on behalf of his brother. The NTA gave him a response sheet for the first session, where the raw score turned out to be only 33, drastically lower than 177 which was the score in the response sheet he had downloaded on July 3. Singh has not moved court yet but said he has submitted both the response sheets to the NTA for re-examination and will decide the course of action based on the testing agency’s response. “A seat in an IIT is invaluable. Such discrepancies will ruin my brother’s dreams. But I am just being pushed around from NTA’s Noida office to Delhi office, to the HRD Ministry, trying to fight for my brother,” he said. Astha Shukla, a student from Delhi, thought she qualified for JEE Advanced as her percentile was 99.9, way above the required cutoff of 88.4. When Astha tried to register for JEE Advanced on August 8, she failed to register as a pop-up box said her application number and password were invalid. Her advocate, Kaustabh Shukla, said Astha got no relief when she approached the NTA. The engineering aspirant then filed a writ petition in the Delhi High Court. They submitted their scorecard and all other documents where Astha’s application number was mentioned. The NTA argued in the court that Astha had applied under application number 220310183267, different from application number 220310182367 which Astha claimed is hers. The NTA said the second application number belongs to some other candidate. The testing agency also said before the court that Astha’s scores were 68.9 percentile in session one, and 58.8 percentile in session 2 making her ineligible for JEE Advanced. It further argued that the documents submitted by Astha are false and unreliable. The Delhi High Court, however, ordered the NTA to let Astha register for JEE Advanced, while stating that the matter will be heard further on August 18. “There might be lakhs of students across the country who might be facing similar issues with the JEE Mains results. We need to highlight this on a national level,” said Shukla. Aditya Mittal, another student, also filed a petition in Delhi HC, complaining that the percentile issued by the NTA changed overnight, making him ineligible for JEE Advanced. Mittal’s advocate Tanvir Ahmed Mir told The Indian Express, “Mittal’s answer sheet that was downloaded on August 3 showed that the score was 220, but on 4th August when my client downloaded the answer sheet again the score was 147. The NTA is saying that they have what they have in the record and they have no clue how the scores became different.” The NTA had said in the court that the response sheet Mittal claims to have downloaded on August 3 is a false document. No interim relief has been granted to Mittal by the Delhi High Court yet. Speaking to The Indian Express, NTA officials have maintained that there are no errors in the results declared. "The response sheets being produced by students in court in which they claim to have scored higher do not match our records. Anyway, the matters are in court and we will clarify there," a senior NTA official said. Anjali, a student from Ghaziabad who had appeared for JEE Mains in Bal Vidya Academy, Rohini Sector 20 in Delhi, also claimed that she faced several technical glitches during her second attempt at JEE Mains held on July 24. “The display of the computer I was taking the exam on would keep switching on and off every 5 minutes during the exam. I complained and they (officials at the centre) changed my seat. But on the new seat, the mouse had a problem. If I chose one option as my answer, all four options would get selected. I complained again and talked to the invigilator of the examination. I got only 5 extra minutes to finish the exam, although I had wasted 20-25 minutes figuring out all the technical glitches,” said Anjali. The hashtag #JEEMainsThirdAttemptForAll also trended on Twitter as hundreds of users demanded that the third round of JEE Mains be allowed for students since previous attempts were marred with technical glitches and snags that the NTA has refused to address. The NTA wrapped up the registration for JEE Advanced on August 12, while the exam will be held on August 28. Around 1.6 lakh students will be appearing for the JEE Advanced.
