56% clear NEET-UG exam, 4 of top 10 from Tamil Nadu

The National Testing Agency on Tuesday announced that 56.2% candidates qualified the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET)-UG for admission to undergraduate courses in medical colleges across the country, with four out of the 10 top-scoring candidates from Tamil Nadu, even as the number of total qualifying students went up from 993,069 last year to 1,145,976 this year.

While Prabanjan J from Tamil Nadu and Bora Varun Chakravarthi from Andhra Pradesh tied for the top spot with the perfect score of 720 marks, or 99.99 percentile, Kaustav Bauri (Tamil Nadu), Pranjal Aggrawal (Punjab), and Dhruv Advani (Uttar Pradesh) stood third, fourth and fifth respectively.

According to NTA, the nodal agency for conducting the exam, NEET-UG recorded the highest registration of 2,087,462 candidates this year. Of them, 2,038,596 or 97.6% appeared, and 1,145,976 or 56.3% candidates qualified the exam. The pass percentage is roughly the same as last year.

Last year, of the 1,764,571 students who appeared, 993,069 or 56.2% qualified the exam. However, in absolute figures, the number of qualifying students increased by 152,907 – an increase of 15.4% over last year.

Among those who qualified this year, 490,374 are male, 655,599 are female and three transgender candidates, NTA said.

Apart from Prabanjan, three other candidates from Tamil Nadu — Kaustav Bauri, all-India rank 3, Surya Siddharth N, rank 6, and Varun S, rank 9— featured among the toppers.