Pune teen tops JEE Advanced, but has no plans to join IIT

Chirag Falor, who had scored a 100 percentile in JEE Main, said his family was confident about him topping nationally, and cake and balloons had been arranged to celebrate the occasion.

Chirag Falor

4 min readPuneOct 7, 2020 02:56 PM IST First published on: Oct 5, 2020 at 11:19 PM IST

Groggy from his early morning classes at USA’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chirag Falor had slept for barely a few hours on Monday when a call from the IIT Delhi director woke him up. “I was half-asleep when I came to know that I have got the top rank in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)-Advanced,” said the resident of Wadgaonsheri.

Falor, who had scored a 100 percentile in JEE Main, said his family was confident about him topping nationally, and cake and balloons had been arranged to celebrate the occasion.

Red | IIT entrance test toughest, says JEE Advanced AIR 1 who has also cleared MIT

A former student of Arnold High School, Falor had moved to Delhi to focus on the JEE, as he “didn’t want any distractions”. The teenager, who didn’t even use a mobile phone for two years to avoid any distraction in his plans to get into IIT, however, has no intention of studying in the coveted institution.

“While in Delhi, I met someone who inspired me to apply to MIT, considered the best engineering college in the world. They take only five to six students from India every year and I was lucky that I cracked the exam. Since September, I have started classes there and now I am waiting for my visa,” says the teenager, who wishes to major in Physics and study ‘space settlements’.

READ | Despite getting AIR 4 in JEE Advanced, Muhender Raj to skip IIT

And while getting a seat at the MIT is no less of a feat, he does admit that the SAT, which is one of the requirements for admission to MIT, and even a few common first-year class examinations which he took for credit, were easier to crack than the JEE.

Falor, whose father Pavan Kumar is a project manager and mother Pooja Devi is a tutor, said that while the JEE was more of a “concept testing” for him after the MIT admission, he was thrilled with his national rank as it would help in his post-graduate admissions, and in getting a job later.

IN PICTURES | Meet JEE Advanced 2020 toppers, know their success stories

“Every year, only one student gets this distinction and this exam is an internationally reputed one… so, even though I won’t study at IIT, this means a lot to me…,” he said.

Meanwhile, of the 1.6 lakh students who had registered for the exam, 1.5 lakh appeared for it and over 43,000 candidates, including 6,707 girls, cleared the exam.

While Falor has scored 352 out of 396 marks, Vijaywada’s Gangula Bhuvan Reddy and Bihar’s Vaibhav Raj bagged the second and third ranks respectively.

Read | JEE Advanced 2020 toppers: Students who started college preparation from middle school

Kanishka Mittal, who bagged the 17th rank with a score of 315 of 396 marks, is the topper among girls.

JEE-Advanced was conducted on September 27 amid strict precautions at exam centres like staggered entry-exits, use of sanitisers, masks and social distancing in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The results, along with cutoffs for admissions to IITs and rank lists, are available on jeeadv.ac.in. The registration for counselling, organised by Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA), begins from October 6. This year, the number of counselling rounds has been reduced by one to ensure timely admissions and beginning of classes.