The NEET-UG 2026 re-test, conducted after the National Testing Agency canceled the original exam on May 3 due to an alleged paper leak, produced two contrasting records – the second lowest attendance since NTA started conducting the exam in 2019, and the highest qualifying cut-off ever recorded.
Data released by the NTA on Thursday night shows that 1.999 million of the 2.280 million registered candidates appeared for the re-exam on June 21 – an attendance rate of 87.72%, nine percentage points lower than the 96.72% recorded on May 3, with 205,140 fewer candidates attending.
It is the lowest attendance rate of any non-pandemic NEET and the second lowest overall after 2020, when Covid-19 pushed attendance to 85.57%. Otherwise, attendance was higher than the mid-1990s — from 92.85% in 2019, then recovering to 95.63% in 2021 and 94.24% in 2022 in two years still plagued by the coronavirus outbreak, then above 97% in both 2023 and 2025. In 2024, attendance reached 96.97%. Of the 2,406,079 students registered in 2024, 2,333,297 students appeared.
The NTA canceled the May 3 exam on May 12, days after receiving an email claiming that the circulating “guess paper” significantly overlapped with the actual question paper. It announced a re-examination from May 15 to June 21. The Central Bank of Iraq, which is investigating the leak, has arrested 13 people so far. NTA officials did not respond to HT’s requests for comment on the drop in attendance and rise in cut-off marks.
The decline affected women more than men. Compared to 2025 data, male attendance fell from 97.04% to 89.54% – a decrease of 7.5 percentage points – while female attendance fell more sharply, from 97.09% to 86.44%, a decrease of 10.65 points.
“Many candidates have been allocated examination centers 200 to 400 km away from their home cities, leading to increased travel and accommodation costs. Momentum disruption, safety concerns, travel difficulties and family stress have been exacerbated by this disruption,” said Keshav Agarwal, educationist and vice-president of the Indian Coaching Federation, which has nearly 1,000 coaching institutes as members.
Dr Lakshya Mittal, president of the United Doctors Front, described the dropping of over 200,000 candidates as “deeply worrying”, saying it highlights “the financial and mental burden that frequent exams place on students”.
Even with the decline in attendance, the chances of qualifying rose sharply. The minimum qualifying score for UR/EWS has risen to 213 – up 69 from 144 last year, and the highest since NTA’s takeover of NEET in 2019, when the cut-off stood at 134. It has fluctuated between 117 (2022) and 162 (2024) in the years since.
However, the proportion of eligible candidates has barely changed. Of the 1.999 million who showed up this year, 1.121 million qualified – a rate of 56.06%, which is roughly equivalent to 55.97% in 2025 and consistent with a trend that has been closer to 56% each year since 2019.
Experts said this is because NEET eligibility is decided by percentages rather than fixed marks – candidates who cross the specified percentage qualify regardless of the absolute score required that year. In other words, the record cut reflects a stronger overall distribution of scores rather than more students qualifying.
Agarwal attributed this rise to several factors exacerbated simultaneously: nearly a month of extra preparation time, an easier biology section that raised scores at the lower end, more rigorous physics and chemistry that culminated excessively at the top, and the absence of more than 200,000 candidates — many of them perhaps less prepared — that led to reduced competition.
The number of qualifiers has tracked attendance broadly over the years, rising from 797,042 in 2019 to a peak of 1.316 million in 2024, before falling to 1.237 million in 2025 and 1.121 million this year — the lowest since 2022, though still higher than in every year from 2019 to 2022. This has been attributed to declining attendance rather than Low success rate.
Uttar Pradesh produced the largest pool of qualifiers, with more than 170,000, while Lakshadweep had 43. The top 17 candidates – all with scores above 705 – came from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
