How 18.88 percentile in JEE (Main) became 98.88

NEW DELHI: Since the declaration of the JEE (Main) results, the National Testing Agency (NTA) has found that many candidates had forged their marksheets. After committing the fraud, some aspirants even convinced their parents to approach the NTA for grievance redressal.
The education ministry had forwarded as many as 107 mails alleging discrepancies to the NTA, which on subsequent investigations were found to be cases of forgery, sources said.
Ayush (name changed) reached out to the ministry of education alleging there was a glitch in his results - that his 98.88 percentile when scanned on the QR code, showed just 18.88 percentile. Mohinder (name changed) reached out to the NTA claiming that when he scanned the QR code, it showed an error page instead of his 96 percentile. Anika (name changed) convinced her parents to seek redressal with the NTA saying she had been evaluated incorrectly, resulting in her scoring 34 percentile.
Among the more serious allegations received from candidates were those regarding "manipulation" of their scores. There were also complaints from some candidates that the results received on email differed from what was on the official website.
NTA officials said pressure to perform had perhaps resulted in many candidates forging their marksheets.
"In one case, the parents came to us alleging that their ward had been given less marks. NTA had to finally take out the response sheet of the candidate and the log audits, and when the parents saw that their ward had skipped 27 questions, they realised what was going on," a senior NTA official said.
According to documents accessed by TOI, the faking was so smartly carried out that the NTA had to retrieve the response sheets and take a relook in many cases. In one case, a student mailed to the NTA attaching a forwarded mail stating he had received it from the agency and his marks as shown in the results were different. "Later, we found out that no such mail was sent from the NTA," said the official.
"One candidate used the QR code of the real marksheet on the forged document he sent to us," he said. "On scanning the QR code, it took us to the results available online. We rechecked the answer book and found that the second result-sheet was fake. In another case, a candidate changed the marks in numericals but didn't change it in words," he said.