The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE Main), the major national engineering entrance exam, was the subject of controversy last year following claims of anomalies in the JEE Main 2021 exam. In the most recent development, a Russian national detained on Tuesday for allegedly rigging the JEE Main exam last year was given two days of CBI detention by the Delhi court.
Mikhail Shargin, the accused, has been placed in CBI custody until October 6 after the organisation asked for his remand to thwart the plot. Due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the National Testing Agency (NTA) held the JEE Main exam last year in four sessions in February, March, July, and August. JEE Mains is held annually to select students for engineering programmes at 23 IITs, 31 NITs, IIEST Shibpur, 26 IIITs, and 29 GFTIS. In a case involving alleged tampering in the JEE Main 2021 session 4 exams that were administered on September 2 last year, the Central Board of Investigation (CBI) detained seven suspects.
JEE Main irregularities
Additionally, Affinity Education Pvt Ltd. and its directors, Siddharth Krishna, Vishambhar Mani Tripathi, and Govind Varshney, were the targets of an FIR filed by the CBI. Following a storm of criticism, the NTA announced that it was initiating a parallel probe involving hundreds of candidates whose scores abruptly increased from 50 percentile in one phase to above 90 percentile in the others. Along with the JEE Main results, the NTA also disqualified 20 students from taking the JEE engineering entrance exam for three years.
The private coaching centre accepted Rs 15 lakhs in exchange for having someone else sit their exam on the condition that they would receive guaranteed admission to one of the National Institutes of Technology (NITs). The tutoring centre was aiding a scam by remotely accessing a test centre in Sonipat, Haryana, to answer the participants’ JEE Main 2021 exam questions. Investigations revealed that certain foreign nationals conspired with other defendants in the case to compromise numerous online exams, including JEE Mains.
According to the PTI, the accused used to gather prospective students’ Class 10 and 12 mark sheets, user IDs, passwords, and post-dated checks as security. Once admission was completed, they used to collect large sums of money, averaging between Rs 12 and 15 lakh per applicant.
JEE Main 2022
The NTA received flak once again this year when numerous students had technological difficulties during the first JEE Main 2022 session. The NTA held the JEE exam 2022 in two sessions, unlike last year. Following a number of technical concerns, including server problems and questions that wouldn’t load, applicants petitioned for a second chance to participate. Justices DY Chandrachud and JB Pardiwala, sitting as a bench on the Supreme Court, ordered the NTA to allow 15 candidates to participate in the extra session scheduled for July 30, 2022.
