New Delhi: Twenty candidates have scored perfect 100 in engineering entrance exam JEE-Main's January edition, the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced on Tuesday. All the candidates with 100 NTA score in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)-Main are males.

The 20 toppers include 14 from the general category, four from the OBC category and one each from gen-EWS and SC category. While Md Sahil Akhtar is the PwD topper with 99.9848042 NTA score, the SC topper is Deshank Pratap Singh with 100 NTA score and ST topper is Dheeravath Thanuj with 99.99041.

The candidates who scored 100 NTA scores are Abhineet Majety, Amogh Jalan, Apurva Samota, Ashik Stenny, Bikkina Abhinav Chowdary, Deshank Pratap Singh, Dhruv Sanjay Jain, Dnyanesh Hemendra Shinde, Duggineni Venkata Yugesh, Gulshan Kumar, Guthikonda Abhiram, Kaushal Vijayvergiya, Krish Gupta, Mayank Son, N K Vishwaajith, Nipun Goel, Rishi Kalra, Soham Das, Suthar Harshul Sanjaybhai and Vavilala Chidvilas Reddy.

"The NTA scores of 50 candidates have been withheld as they are under scrutiny The cases of these candidates are being placed before a committee separately. Their NTA scores will be declared once the committee finalises its report," a senior NTA official said.

NTA score is not the same as percentage of marks obtained but normalised scores.

"NTA scores are normalised scores across multi-session papers and are based on the relative performance of all those who appeared for the examination in one session. The marks obtained are converted into a scale ranging from 100 to 0 for each session of examinees," the official explained.

95.80 per cent attendance was recorded in the January edition of the crucial exam with over 8.23 lakh candidates appearing for it.

The examination was held in 13 languages (Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu).

The examination was also conducted outside India in 17 cities of Manama, Doha, Dubai, Kathmandu, Muscat, Riyadh, Sharjah, Singapore, Kuwait City, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos and Abuja, Colombo, Jakarta, Moscow, Port Louis, Bangkok, Washington D.C.

The second edition of the exam will be conducted in April. After both sessions of JEE (Main) - 2023 examination, the ranks of the candidates will be released taking into consideration the best of the two NTA scores in accordance with the policy already made.

Based on the results of JEE-Mains Paper 1 and Paper 2, the top 2.6 lakh candidates will be eligible to appear for the JEE-Advanced exam, which is a one-stop exam to get admission into the 23 premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

Last year the qualifying percentile at JEE (Main) to be eligible for JEE (Advanced), the entrance test for admission to IITs, has registered a four-year-low for all the reserved categories and a three-year low for the unreserved category.