Only 2 top-10,000 candidates had huge score gaps: IIT Roorkee on mass-cheating claims

The institute further emphasised that there was ‘nothing exceptional or anomalous’ about this year’s results or the gap in students’ scores across both papers.

The controversy emerged after several social media posts claimed to have identified unusual differences between candidates’ Paper 1 and Paper 2 marks. As seen in multiple posts, users alleged discrepancies between the two papers for several JEE Advanced 2026 candidates. The users cited data that could not be independently verified and claimed it pointed towards possible irregularities in the examination process.

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The allegations largely centred on unusually large score gaps between the two papers, which some users interpreted as a possible indication of cheating, unauthorised assistance or other forms of examination malpractice. Some also questioned the authenticity of the circulated score data itself. In the wider discussion around the posts, people additionally alleged possible mass cheating or weak invigilation, with some arguing that the examination setup may have enabled dishonest behaviour.

Responding directly to these concerns, IIT Roorkee said that substantial differences between marks in the two papers were extremely limited. According to the institute, among the top 10,000 candidates, only two students showed a significant variation between their Paper 1 and Paper 2 scores. It added that such differences are not unusual and have been observed and analysed over the years since JEE Advanced adopted the two-paper format.

Amid the debate, IIT Kanpur Director Manindra Agrawal also shared his perspective on social media. Calling the allegations a misunderstanding of basic statistical principles, Agrawal wrote that when around 60,000 students take the examination, a small number of candidates are naturally expected to display unusually large differences between their performances in the two papers. Referring to statistical concepts such as Chebyshev’s inequality, he argued that such outliers have existed in JEE Advanced ever since the two-paper structure was introduced.

You are right, cheating cannot be denied. I was making the case that small number of outliers have no correlation with occurance of cheating. We need to look at cases closely to understand what happened.

— Manindra Agrawal (@agrawalmanindra) June 8, 2026

As questions continued to be raised online, Agrawal offered further explanations. He noted that bright students can occasionally get stuck on a difficult question during an examination, spending an unexpectedly large amount of time trying to solve it and consequently affecting their overall performance in that paper. While describing such cases as rare, he said discussions around the current controversy were focused precisely on these outlier situations.

In another response, he clarified that the possibility of cheating can never be completely ruled out in any examination. However, he stressed that the existence of a small number of ‘statistical outliers’ by itself does not establish any correlation with cheating and that individual cases would need to be examined carefully before concluding.