Colleges spar over IIT JEE Advanced rank holders

Hyderabad: Accusations and counteraccusations have been rocking both online and offline media ever since full-page advertisements in newspapers on successful candidates of the IIT JEE Advanced 2019 entrance tests from various institutions appeared on Saturday.

Notably, candidate profiles have been duplicated or repeated as having achieved different ranks in the same advertisement. Additionally, in a strange twist, institutions have also brazenly passed off students from rival institutions as their own.

In a WhatsApp video which has gone viral, pages of a leading Telugu newspaper are displayed in which as many as eight Sri Chaitanya candidates are shown as having bagged many ranks within the top 100, out of which the photographs of a few students are repeated with different ranks.

What takes the cake is that the same newspaper carries an advertisement on the other pages heralding two candidates of Sri Chaitanya- Bhavik Bansal and Akshit Kaushik - as the second and third rank holders which is what another coaching institution, Aakash claims too.

In yet another case, Gillella Akash Reddy, hailed as South India's number one by Chaitanya was featured in the ranking list of competing institutions which ranked him as no 4 under open category.

Also, in South India girls category, Surapaneni Sai Vigna was hailed as No 1 in one of the advertisements while she was ranked a relatively unimpressive 44th in the Sri Chaitanya advertisement in the open category.

When queried about how the candidates could secure rankings in two institutions, a spokesperson from Sri Chaitanya accused the rival Group of having poached two of their candidates, the ones who were featured in the advertisement.

"It is nothing but a very mean technique of trying to bask in reflected glory," the spokesperson concluded. Parents however need to do their homework for sure about such contesting claims before they admit their wards, avers a teacher.