Questions raised over last year’s engg merit list; CET denies charges

Concerns arise over Maharashtra's CET after claims of discrepancies between high CET scores and low Class 12 marks; officials deny authenticity of merit list.

MUMBAI: Questions are being raised over Maharashtra’s Common Entrance Test (CET) conducted in 2025 for admission to the engineering stream. Doubts arose after social media users on Monday claimed that students in near-perfect CET percentiles had scored comparatively low marks in their Class 12 board examination.

Questions raised over last year’s engg merit list; CET denies charges

The social media posts shared the purported merit list announced by the State CET. They also shared screenshots that purportedly showed students with 99 to 100 percentile in the CET and their marks in the Class 12 exam – 50-60% in physics, chemistry and mathematics in Class 12.

The State CET Cell categorically says the merit list being circulated is not authentic. Officials also said the cell cannot validate screenshots, and urged students and parents not to trust unauthorised social media posts.

The issue took on political colour after Sachin Sawant, national secretary, All-India Congress Committee, reposted content shared by Gurdeep Singh Sappal, member of Congress Working Committee, and others on social media platform X. The posts questioned whether the merit list had been doctored and whether there were irregularities in the scoring system.

Some social media users demanded an inquiry similar to the one conducted into NEET, while others called for greater transparency from the CET authorities.

In response, the State CET Cell states that the merit list being circulated online does not match the provisional merit list released by the cell in June last year. According to officials, the original application identification numbers issued by the CET Cell begin with the prefix “EN”, whereas the screenshots display them as beginning with “PCM”.

The CET Cell also pointed to discrepancies in the categories of students, their Class 10 and Class 12 marks, and even their percentile scores in the circulated images.

Defending the examination system, the cell said the CET is conducted as a computer-based test in multiple shifts with different question papers for each shift. Because of this structure, officials said large-scale manipulation of this nature was very unlikely.

Sawant, on the other hand, claimed the students’ names and roll numbers were intentionally changed to protect their identities. “This is not about names or changed seat numbers, it is about the scores. If a student studies the same PCM subjects for CET and Class 12, scores 100 percentile in CET, and only 51% in PCM subjects in HSC, naturally questions will arise,” he said.

He claimed the CET Cell is focusing only on technical discrepancies in the screenshots rather than addressing the core issue.

Maheshwar Peri, who runs an education magazine and web portal, was among the first to share the screenshots online. He admitted that names and application numbers had been blurred and modified using artificial intelligence tools to protect students’ identities.

“We had to blur the names of students and the application numbers. I understand that some values also changed during the process, but that does not change the larger argument. The corrected image has already been shared and this remains unchanged.”