JEE Advanced 2026 has produced a notable shift in qualification rates across several categories, with Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) candidates recording sharp increases and women achieving their highest qualification rate in six years.
A total of 56,880 candidates qualified for the examination this year, including 15,856 SC and 6,379 ST candidates. The official JEE Advanced 2026 results also show that 10,107 women qualified after 40,562 female candidates appeared in both papers.
The changes came despite higher qualifying marks across every category, raising questions about how the distribution of marks and category-specific thresholds shaped the qualification rates.
SC and ST candidates see biggest gains
The SC qualification rate climbed to 50.16% in 2026 from 40.41% in 2025, an increase of about 9.8 percentage points. The ST qualification rate rose to 42.14% from 33.99%, up by about 8.1 percentage points.
In practical terms, around one in every two registered SC candidates qualified this year, compared with roughly two in five last year. Among ST candidates, more than two in five qualified, compared with about one in three in 2025.
The number of SC qualifiers rose from 12,499 last year to 15,856, while ST qualifiers increased from 5,008 to 6,379.
The official JEE Advanced data records 15,817 non-PwD SC qualifiers and 39 SC-PwD qualifiers, and 6,365 non-PwD ST qualifiers and 14 ST-PwD qualifiers.
The increase is particularly significant because the qualifying thresholds were raised rather than lowered.
General and OBC-NCL qualification rates fall
The trend was different for general category and OBC-NCL candidates.
General category qualifiers declined slightly in absolute numbers, from 16,154 in 2025 to 15,883 this year, while the qualification rate fell from 43% to 39.8%.
For OBC-NCL candidates, the number of qualifiers declined from 12,606 to 12,385, with the qualification rate falling from 18.2% to 17.5%.
The Economically Weaker Section (EWS) category recorded an increase in qualifiers, from 6,291 to 6,377. Its qualification rate remained broadly stable at about 21%, compared with 21.6% last year.
The official result data separately records 15,530 GEN qualifiers, 353 GEN-PwD qualifiers, 12,030 OBC-NCL qualifiers and 355 OBC-NCL-PwD qualifiers, alongside the corresponding EWS figures.
Qualifying marks rose across categories
The increase in SC and ST qualification rates cannot be explained by lower cut-offs. Qualifying marks rose across all categories in JEE Advanced 2026.
The Common Rank List (CRL) qualifying marks increased to 92 out of 360 from 74 last year, an increase of 18 marks. The CRL is the overall merit list prepared on the basis of a candidate's total marks, irrespective of category.
For general category candidates, the qualifying mark increased from 74 to 92. For OBC-NCL and GEN-EWS candidates, it rose from 66 to 82. The SC and ST threshold increased from 37 to 46.
The Joint Implementation Committee (JIC) report released by IIT Roorkee does not attribute the category-wise changes to differences in candidate performance or changes in the composition of the candidate pool.
Instead, it notes that the qualifying criteria were relaxed to ensure that at least twice the number of candidates qualified compared with the number of seats available in each category.
Ultimately, the qualification rate depends on the distribution of marks among candidates as well as the qualifying threshold fixed for each category.
Women record highest qualification rate since 2021
Women registered their strongest qualification rate in the six-year period covered by the report.
Of the 43,112 women who registered for JEE Advanced 2026, 40,562 appeared in both papers and 10,107 qualified. The official results confirm that women accounted for 10,107 of the 56,880 total qualifiers.
The female qualification rate increased to 23.4% from 21.7% in 2025, a rise of 1.7 percentage points. It was the highest rate recorded between 2021 and 2026, with last year's 21.7% being the previous high.
Female registrations were marginally lower than the 43,413 recorded in 2025. Nevertheless, nearly one in four women who registered qualified this year, compared with roughly one in five last year.
The rise also cuts across categories. Among female candidates, 2,415 GEN, 1,603 OBC-NCL, 888 GEN-EWS, 3,521 SC and 1,491 ST candidates without PwD status qualified, with additional qualifiers recorded among female PwD candidates.
More than 3,800 women receive IIT seats
Qualification, however, does not automatically translate into an IIT seat.
The final IIT allotment included 3,814 women, representing about 20.2% of the 18,861 seats allotted. Of these, 37 women secured seats through the gender-neutral pool, while 3,777 were admitted through female-only supernumerary seats.
The figures broadly reflect the impact of the Supernumerary Seats Scheme (SSS), introduced in 2018 to address the gender imbalance in the IITs.
The scheme creates additional seats exclusively for women rather than taking away seats available to male candidates, with the objective of moving female representation towards 20%.
Before the scheme was introduced, women accounted for around 7% to 9% of BTech students at IITs. Their representation rose to nearly 20% by 2020 and has remained around that level since.
A 2025 study by IIT Delhi and the University of Houston found that the scheme increased women's representation in traditionally male-dominated engineering branches and also boosted the representation of SC/ST women at the IITs.
Qualifying and getting an IIT seat are different stages
The JEE Advanced numbers also highlight the distinction between qualifying for the examination and actually securing an IIT seat.
Of the 56,880 candidates who qualified, 52,559 registered for Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) counselling and filled in their choices. Another 4,321 qualifiers did not enter the choice-filling process.
Candidates who participated could submit preferences across the 23 IITs and their programmes.
In the gender-neutral pool, the last candidate allotted an IIT seat had a CRL rank of 28,480. That does not mean every candidate up to that rank received a seat, since allotment depends on rank, category, choices, programme preferences and the availability of seats.
For women competing in the female-only pool, the last CRL rank at which an IIT seat was allotted was 29,824.
The closing ranks in the gender-neutral pool were 4,432 for GEN-EWS, 9,002 for OBC-NCL, 4,075 for SC and 2,199 for ST.
In the female-only pool, the corresponding closing ranks were 5,852 for GEN-EWS, 11,941 for OBC-NCL, 4,874 for SC and 2,112 for ST.
JEE Advanced rank expands beyond IITs
The importance of a JEE Advanced rank is no longer confined to the IIT system.
IISc Bengaluru, IIM Lucknow, the Indian Institute of Petroleum and Energy (IIPE), Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology (RGIPT) signed agreements to use JEE Advanced 2026 ranks for undergraduate admissions.
IISc Bengaluru had also announced that admission to its BTech programmes for the 2026-27 academic year would be made through JoSAA using JEE Advanced 2026 ranks.
The broader use of JEE Advanced ranks has renewed the debate over whether India's higher education system should expand the number of institutions offering high-quality engineering education rather than focus exclusively on increasing IIT intake.
Experts caution against rapid IIT seat expansion
BITS Pilani vice chancellor V Ramgopal Rao, a former IIT Delhi director, argued that the wider higher education ecosystem needs to expand so that students have more institutions they can choose with confidence.
He said India cannot expect the IITs alone to meet the aspirations of a country of its size and that admission outside the IIT system should not automatically be viewed as an inferior outcome.
Rao also cautioned against interpreting the fact that only about one-third of JEE Advanced qualifiers secure IIT seats as an argument for rapidly increasing IIT intake.
Qualifying JEE Advanced, he said, is not an entitlement to an IIT seat. The qualifying pool is deliberately kept larger than the number of available seats to accommodate counselling, category allocations and student choices.
Any expansion, he said, should be accompanied by adequate recruitment of faculty and expansion of laboratories, classrooms, hostels and student-support infrastructure.
IIT Kharagpur director Prof Suman Chakraborty made a similar argument, saying expansion of IIT seats must keep pace with faculty, laboratories, classrooms, hostels and student-support systems.
He said the priority should not be the fastest possible increase in seats, but the fastest expansion that does not dilute the quality of the IIT experience.
Chakraborty also proposed widening access to IIT-level education beyond physical campuses through an “Outreach Course Network” combining online learning with local academic partners, laboratories, mentoring and assessment.
India, he argued, needs two parallel forms of expansion: carefully calibrated growth in physical IIT capacity without compromising quality, and a much wider expansion of access to IIT-quality education beyond the geographical boundaries of IIT campuses.
The 2026 JEE Advanced results therefore point to two separate developments: a sharp rise in qualification rates among SC and ST candidates and a six-year high for women, alongside a continuing gap between the number of students who qualify and the number who ultimately secure IIT seats.