Eight from TN among 67 national toppers in NEET-UG
CHENNAI: A record number of 67 students, including eight from Tamil Nadu, have secured All India Rank 1 in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) UG 2024 examination, results of which were announced on Tuesday.
The state has repeated it’s stellar performance this year too. Last year, state boy Prabanjan J had emerged as the national joint topper along with Bora Varun Chakravarthi of Andhra Pradesh scoring 99.99 percentile, while this year eight students from the state: Syed Aarifin Yusuf M, Shailaja S, Aditya Kumar Panda, Sriram P, Rajaneesh P, Jayathi Poorvaja M, Rohith R and Sabareesan S have scored a perfect 99.99 percentile and grabbed the rank 1 position. While Syed Aarifin Yusuf M is topper in the male category in the state, Shailaja is the topper in the female category.
According to experts, this is TN’s best performance in NEET in recent times. “After Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu is the second state in the country with the highest share of AIR 1 rank holders,” said L Samuel, faculty at a NEET coaching centre. This year we have eight students with AIR 1 while last year six students from the state had featured in the top 50 list. This year’s performance is much better in comparison to last year, Samuel added.
Career consultant Jayaprakash Gandhi said that there will be fierce competition among students to grab a medical seat in their college of choice. “This year’s question paper was easier than last year so it was expected that the number of students scoring more than 700 will be more compared to previous years,” he added.
At least 1,52,920 TN students had appeared for NEET 2024 and 89,426 students had cleared the test. The overall pass percentage is 58.47 against last year’s 54.45%. Last year 1,44,516 students from the state appeared for the medical entrance test, out of which 78,693 had cleared the exam.
Notably, this year 36,333 students, almost 6,000 more than last year, had written the exam in Tamil.
As many as 23.33 lakh students had taken NEET 2024 all over the country, of which 13.16 lakh cleared it. The National Testing Agency (NTA) conducted the NEET (UG) exam at 4,750 centres located in 571 cities throughout the country, including 14 cities outside India on May 5. The examination was conducted in 13 languages: Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.