New Delhi: The attendance data for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) ran into a controversy Thursday after BJP leader Subramanian Swamy contested the figures shared by Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’.
Pokhriyal tweeted Wednesday that 8.58 lakh students registered for JEE Mains — of which 6.35 lakh students appeared for the exams.
The data was, however, disputed by Swamy, who claimed that the government has given two different registration figures — 8.58 lakh and 9.53 lakh.
I will soon tweet what the Ministry of Education stated to the Supreme Court as candidates registered State wide and abroad at 953 473 at 660 centres. The Minister’s tweet for me to see his “facts” was 8.58 lakhs. Now whose’s is official?
— Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) September 10, 2020
When ThePrint contacted the officials in the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducts the JEE Mains exams, it turned out that the agency indeed shared two figures publicly.
While the 8.58 lakh figure is the JEE Mains overall registration number, the 9.53 lakh is the figure for distribution of candidates across centres.
“JEE Mains is an exam for engineering and architecture courses. One registered candidate can write upto three exams — BTech, BArch and BPlanning, and every time he or she appears, they will be counted as one candidate. One registration can be counted as three candidates, hence the number of candidates is more than the registered numbers,” an NTA official said.
Director-General of NTA Vineet Joshi said, “There can be a student writing BArch, BPlanning and BTech/BE, (and) that person will be counted as three candidates. So there is nothing wrong with the data that NTA has shared, it seems to be some misunderstanding.”
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How 2 numbers emerged
The two different figures that Swamy is talking about were shared by the NTA in a press release on 25 August.
In the release, the NTA said, “8.58 lakh candidates have been registered for JEE (Mains)”.
In the same press release, while sharing the state-wise break-up of JEE candidate distribution across different centers, the agency informed that for P1+ P2, there are 9.53 lakh candidates across various centres. P1 is the BTech/BE exam, and P2 is the BArch and BPlanning exam.
In an earlier press release, dated 17 August, the NTA shared the break-up of candidates writing JEE (Mains) for different courses.
According to that, 7,46,115 candidates appeared for BE/BTech only, 13,609 for BArch only and 699 for BPlanning only. However, 53,520 appeared for both BE/BTech and BArch exams, 5,580 for BE/BTech and BPlanning, 2,777 for BArch and BPlanning, and 35,973 appeared for all the three exams.
This makes it evident that one registered candidate applied to write more than one exam.
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