With the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) results being declared on Monday, Bihar girl Kalpana Kumari bagged the top rank for admission to medical and dental colleges across the country. Further, the maximum number of candidates clearing the exam this year hailed from Uttar Pradesh.
Kumari secured a percentile score of 99.99 and 691 marks. Telangana's Rohan Purohit and Delhi's Himanshu Sharma jointly bagged the second position with 690 marks. The third rank was shared by Aarosh Dhamija from Delhi and Prince Chaudhary from Rajasthan, both of whom scored 686 marks.
A total of 1.3 million candidates had registered for the exam -- a 16.49 per cent increase from last year. However, 1,269,000 candidates appeared for the test, 714,000 of whom cleared it.
Overall, 56.26 per cent students have cleared NEET this year with Nagaland recording the lowest pass percentage - only 29.3 per cent students cleared the exam.
The pass percentage of boys and girls in the exam is almost equal (approximately 56 per cent).
The exam was held at 2,255 test centres across the country. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) conducted the NEET exam for admission to MBBS/BDS courses for the year 2018-19 on May 6, 2018. The test was conducted in 136 cities in 11 languages.
As many as 76,778 candidates from Uttar Pradesh cleared the test. Over 72,000 and 70,000 candidates cleared the test from Kerala and Maharashtra, respectively.
The results have been put up on the official websites of the board -- www.cbseneet.nic.in and www.cbseresults.nic.in.
NEET is conducted by the CBSE for admission to MBBS and BDS courses in colleges run with the approval of the Medical Council of India (MCI) and the Dental Council of India (DCI).
The test is not for admissions to institutions established through an Act of Parliament such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) in Puducherry.
Earlier, NEET was traditionally conducted in English and Hindi. For the first time in 2018, NEET was conducted in six additional languages — Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, and Tamil.