MUMBAI: Rajit Gupta of Kota emerged at the top of the JEE Advanced 2025 rank list, securing 332 out of 360 marks. Gupta, whose father himself ranked 48th in Rajasthan’s Pre Engineering Test of 1994, will join IIT Bombay’s computer science department.Nipping at Gupta’s heels, Saksham Jindal from Hisar in Haryana, the son of doctor parents, matched his score but fell just short on tie-breaking metrics – based on higher positive marks. Gupta got 335 and Jindal got 333. Majid Husain stood third with 330. This year the list saw more ties – ranks 6 and 7 both scored 321, and 8 and 9 shared a score of 319 – making the race not just close, but highly competitive.The coaching hub of Kota, often in the news for negative reasons, had cause to celebrate Monday as an unprecedented 42 from the city ranked in the top 100 – its best showing since the exam’s current format was adopted in 2013.Out of 54,378 who cleared JEE-Adv, 9,404 are women Devdutta Majhi from West Bengal, who gave up her violin during her JEE Advanced preparation, emerged as the top-ranking female candidate in the country. With an All-India Rank of 16 and a score of 312, her preparation was largely self-led, with some mock tests and doubt-solving sessions. She also turned to her mother to clear her doubts. In Aug, she will join the Indian Institute of Science. Of the 1.8 lakh candidates who sat through both the papers on May 18, only 54,378 made it past the finish line. Among them, 9,404 are women. It was not just the achievers that drew attention – this year, the cutoffs also reduced. The minimum qualifying marks for the general category nosedived to 74 from last year’s 109. With just 7 marks needed per subject-physics, chemistry and math-the subject-wise cutoff also reduced, down from 10 a year ago.Across social categories, the dip was uniform. OBC and Economically Weaker Sections candidates needed 66 marks (18.5%), while SC/ST candidates qualified at 37 marks-10.28% – with a subject-wise minimum of 3.While students from the IIT Bombay zone dominated the upper echelons of the merit list, it was the IIT Hyderabad zone – encompassing the southern states – that sent the largest cohort across the qualifying line. As many as 13,000 candidates from this zone made the cut. Close on its heels was the IIT Delhi zone, with 11,370 qualifiers, followed by the IIT Bombay zone, contributing 11,226 aspirants to the pool of those eligible for counselling.Analysis showed that the top 10 ranks closed at 317 this year, down from 329 in 2024. Sreedhar Babu, a math mentor and IIT Bombay alumnus, said, “The paper was long. Some students who followed the linear order – chemistry, then physics, then math – ended up losing steam midway.” He pointed to broader answer ranges in numerical questions that favoured rough estimates over rigour. “Ironically, those who guessed well gained, while the ones who slogged through every digit didn’t benefit proportionately.“
