In the preliminary exam of the Civil Services Examination on May 28, 2023, 14,624 candidates qualified for the next stage. In the final result, the Union Public Service Commission recommended 1,016 candidates for appointment.
Coaching websites estimate that about 13 lakh people applied that year. This figure is an estimate and not an official count.
Kota Factory, a web series by The Viral Fever, appeared in 2019. It follows students in Kota, Rajasthan, who prepare for the entrance exam of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
“Students come to Kota by the tens of thousands,” The Caravan wrote. ThePrint counted around 2.5 lakh aspirants in the city in 2023.
12th Fail, written, produced and directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, was released in theaters on October 27, 2023. It is based on a 2019 nonfiction book by Anurag Pathak.
The film tells the story of Manoj Kumar Sharma, “who overcame extreme poverty to become an Indian Police Service officer.” Officers of the Indian Police Service are recruited through the civil services exam.
On October 10, 2020, Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi published its first cut-off list for undergraduate admission. Three honors courses required 100 percent: Political Science, Economics and Psychology. Scroll reported that no Delhi University college had done this since 2015.
In 2021 several colleges, among them SRCC and Hindu College, set cut-offs of 100 percent in their first lists. The cut-off is the lowest score in the school-leaving exam that a college accepts for a course.
Under the IAS (Regulation of Seniority) Rules, 1987, every officer of the Indian Administrative Service is assigned a year of allotment. For an officer recruited directly through the competitive exam, it is the year after the exam.
Under rule 4, “direct recruit officers shall be ranked inter-se in the order of merit,” as fixed under the probation rules of 1954.
For NEET-UG 2024, the national entrance exam for medical colleges, 23,81,833 students registered, Careers360 reported. The exam was held on May 5, 2024.
According to the same source, India had 1,08,940 seats for the MBBS degree.
Topper. “A student who gets the highest results in the class,” in the definition of the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, which marks the word as Indian English.
IITian. A graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology. Wiktionary marks the word as Indian usage.
AIR. All India Rank. When the civil services results came out in 2024, Careers360 reported that “Aditya Srivastava secures AIR 1.”
In 2024, 12.31 lakh aspirants were counted in the first session of JEE Main, the first stage of the engineering entrance exam. For JEE Advanced, the exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology, more than 1.91 lakh students applied for 17,385 seats in 23 IITs, according to the coaching institute Allen.
In the same year, 3.29 lakh candidates registered for the Common Admission Test, the entrance exam of the Indian Institutes of Management.
In December 2024 India’s Central Consumer Protection Authority fined three coaching institutes for misleading claims about the civil services exam. Vajirao & Reddy Institute had claimed “617 selections out of 933.” StudyIQ IAS had claimed “120+ selections.” Each of the two was fined 7 lakh rupees.
In 2025 the authority fined Vision IAS 11 lakh rupees. It had claimed “7 in Top 10 and 79 in Top 100 selections in CSE 2023.” By then the authority had fined 28 coaching institutes.
In January 2015 the Deccan Chronicle reported on matrimonial websites open only to alumni of premier institutes such as the IITs and IIMs. Some asked for certificates before they activated a profile.
Matrimony.com launched IIMIITMatrimony.com, “an exclusive service for finding a life partner who has graduated from premier institutes.” Murugavel Janakiraman, the founder of Matrimony.com, said that “education definitely is a key selection criteria when it comes to finding a life partner.”