IIT Roorkee rules out easing 75% Class 12 cutoff for JEE admissions despite CBSE marking backlash

IIT Roorkee said it will not relax the 75% Class 12 eligibility requirement for admission to IITs and NITs.

The institute acknowledged the distress caused by controversies over the Central Board of Secondary Education's new marking system and pledged to coordinate with the board to help affected students.

"No relaxation in marks as candidates from 36 different boards are participating. We published this criterion almost in December, and last year some candidates lost IIT/NIT seats mainly due to percentages. Hence, lowering is not possible," IIT Roorkee said in a statement.

"However, we are in close touch with CBSE and will try to resolve this for all those affected candidates on priority," it added.

Current rules require candidates seeking IIT seats via JEE Advanced to secure at least 75% in Class 12 or be among the top 20 percentile in their board.

A similar threshold applies for admission to NITs, IIITs, and other centrally funded technical institutions through JEE Main. IIT Roorkee is organizing JEE Advanced 2026 and serves as the nodal authority for eligibility decisions this year.

Calls for a one-time exemption grew on social media after students said they achieved competitive JEE ranks but missed the Class 12 percentage cutoff by narrow margins. They alleged errors and inconsistencies linked to CBSE's On-Screen Marking system.

Many students have filed for verification, requested photocopies of evaluated answer books, and sought re-evaluation in hopes corrections will restore their eligibility.

The 75% requirement was reinstated after being suspended during the pandemic for the 2020 to 2022 admission cycles.

Students and parents pointed to that precedent while urging a temporary waiver for this year, arguing the CBSE marking dispute qualifies as an extraordinary circumstance.

IIT Roorkee said the multi-board nature of JEE admissions, with 36 participating education boards, and the advance publication of the criterion in December make a unilateral relaxation impractical and unfair to students from other boards.

CBSE said its post-result grievance portal successfully withstood a major denial-of-service attack on June 3. Nearly 3.8 million malicious packets were detected and blocked, and technical teams kept the platform protected and fully operational.

As of June 4, the board reported receiving 70,433 successful applications through the grievance process, including 7,314 requests for verification of marks and 63,119 for re-evaluation. This reflects large-scale demand for reviews amid the marking controversy.

"Despite a malicious Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack involving nearly 3.8 million packets on 3 June 2026, the portal remained protected and operational due to timely intervention by technical teams," the board said.

The portal's security has been under scrutiny after earlier reports of payment gateway issues and other system disruptions.

CBSE said the verification and re-evaluation portal only launched after an emergency security hardening and validation exercise that included penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and load-stress testing with specialized cybersecurity support.

The system was reinforced with a web application firewall, DDoS mitigation tools, secure authentication, audit logging, and continuous monitoring before it was activated at about 4:30 am on June 2.

Two minutes after the portal opened, it recorded roughly 1.5 million access requests and detected more than 100,000 unauthorized access attempts. CBSE mitigated these issues through the deployed security architecture.

The portal's launch followed an IIT-led cybersecurity review that found multiple vulnerabilities in CBSE's digital systems.

Expert teams from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur carried out the review after Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan requested assistance on May 24 amid mounting complaints about OSM and other technical difficulties.

Sources said the board delayed the portal's opening after the review uncovered at least four critical or high-severity vulnerabilities, along with several medium- and low-severity issues.

The audit used a red team–blue team approach. CBSE's developers and experts from IIT Madras and the Digital India Corporation formed the blue team to fix flaws, while IIT Kanpur's red team attempted to breach the system.

Four rounds of testing were carried out. A red team exercise on June 1 uncovered fresh vulnerabilities that prompted further fixes before the portal launched in the early hours of June 2.

Officials described one serious access-control flaw that could let a logged-in user retrieve other students' answer scripts by manipulating identifiers in a web address.

The teams also reviewed Coempt Edu Teck's platform, the Hyderabad-based edtech contractor that ran the OSM system, and identified additional security concerns.

Coempt will no longer power the re-evaluation workflow. Student and examination data held by the company has been migrated to CBSE-controlled infrastructure, and re-evaluation will now proceed through the board's own portal. Coempt's role is limited to re-scanning blurred answer scripts when requested.

The IIT teams found three vulnerabilities in a revised Coempt platform, including a potential man-in-the-middle exposure and two technical issues that remain under remediation.

Officials said another round of red team testing will follow, and the IIT teams are preparing broader recommendations for the Education Ministry while prioritizing system security and a safe re-evaluation process.

The re-evaluation workflow is not yet active for examiners. For now the portal is collecting student requests and storing submissions.

Once the examiner-facing platform is cleared, examiners will be assigned a set number of scanned papers and will review only the specific questions flagged by students.

Examiners will work digitally on tablets, and the original evaluator's marks will be hidden to promote independent reassessment. Revised scores, if any, will appear on the PRA portal after the process concludes.

Officials said the vulnerabilities stemmed largely from coding and configuration errors rather than the OSM switch itself and noted that AI-based tools have made such flaws easier to discover. It was reported that AI tools, including Claude, were used during testing to detect vulnerabilities.

The developments come as the Joint Seat Allocation Authority's counselling for admissions to IITs, NITs, IIITs, IISc, and other technical institutes for the 2026-27 academic year began on June 2 and will close on June 11.

Separately, CBSE clarified why many students see differences between totals on their evaluated answer sheets and the marks reflected in final results. The board said discrepancies often arise when students over-attempt questions that include internal choices.

In such cases only the highest-scoring attempt among the options is counted. Other answers are marked "Over Attempt" and excluded from the final tally. CBSE shared an example from a Chemistry paper.

If a student scores three marks on one option and two marks on the other, only the three marks are included, and the two-mark attempt is marked with an asterisk and not added to the total.

The board urged students to check asterisk markings and footnotes on scanned answer sheets before recalculating totals.