City boy ranked all India 80th in JEE (A)

Chennai: Due to the tough JEE (Advanced) question paper this year, there was just one student from Tamil Nadu featured among the top 100 JEE rankers. The topper, Divyant Jayakumar from Chettinad Vidhyashram, got an All India Rank of 80 with 285 out of 360 marks in the entrance exam for prestigious IITs.

Last year, three students from the state got within the top 100 ranks, and the topper secured the 42nd rank.

IIT Kanpur, which conducted the JEE (Advanced) exam, declared the results on Monday. Of the 1,80,422 candidates who appeared for the exam, 54,378 qualified, and of them, 9,404 were girls. Tamil Nadu topper Divyant Jayakumar is planning to join computer science engineering at IIT Bombay or IIT Madras.

"I was expecting a score above 280 marks. I am happy to get within the top 100 ranks. JEE (Advanced) paper two was one of the toughest papers in recent years," he said. He started the JEE preparation from Class IX onwards. He said starting the preparations very early helped him. Besides academics, he likes to listen to music and play football.

Other students, Shreyas Ramakrishnan and Muhammed Safwan R, got the AIR 154 and 314 ranks, respectively. Another student, R P Sudharshnan, got the 322nd rank. "There was no score above 300 from Tamil Nadu in the JEE (Advanced) exam this year. The dip in performance is due to the lengthy question paper," said B Pavan Kumar, an expert trainer for the JEE exam. The number of students securing top 100 ranks also came down from three last year to one this year.

However, Santosh Singh, academic head of Allen Career Institute in Chennai, said many students from Tamil Nadu got within the top 1000 ranks this year. "Unlike NEET, the poor performance in the JEE (Advanced) exam will not affect the chance of getting admissions to IITs. Even low scores got higher ranks this year due to the tougher exam for all students," he added.

All India topper Rajit Gupta got 332 out of 360 marks.