May 30: Delhi Public School (DPS), Bokaro Steel City, today claimed to have created a record when as many as 52 students of its “current batch” were declared to have cleared the IIT Joint Entrance Examination — described as the toughest college entrance test in the world.

Over 243,000 students had appeared for the 5,537 seats in the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad and Institute of Technology at BHU.

The elated principal of DPS, Bokaro, Hemlata S. Mohan, told The Telegraph that she expected a few more of her students to have made it. Complete information, she hoped, will be available by Thursday.

But 52 students making it from the same batch of the same school, she asserted, is a record. “Imagine, about 1 per cent of all IIT entrants this year are from this one school,” said an excited Mohan, attributing the spectacular success to the collective work put in by students, teachers and parents.

“The number will be even higher if one takes into account the students from previous batches who took the examination this year,” she exclaimed.

The school, however, slipped in the ranking with the best rank secured by its students being 130th ranked Mohammad Jawed Iqbal.

Kushal Dudani (all-India rank 73) and Dheeraj Kumar Singh (AIR 74) from Jamshedpur and Mudit Agarwal (AIR 105) from Ranchi were placed higher.

But that can scarcely detract from the spectacular performance of the DPS, Bokaro, students in an examination, which is cracked by barely 2 per cent of the examinees.

Remarkably, Mumbai and Delhi zones this year account for over 3,600 successful candidates.

Among 109 successful candidates from the Scheduled Tribes is Vikas Munda from Bundu, who has secured 14th rank in the ST category and Soumya Mandi from Bhandaro (East Singhbhum), who has secured the 18th rank in the same category. Nearly 6,000 ST candidates had appeared at the examination.

What is not clear is whether the success can be attributed to schools or to the coaching institutes. Virtually, all coaching institutes made extravagant claims today.

At Jamshedpur, they claimed 154 students from the city had made it to the IIT, a slump from 180 last year. But rankings, they claimed, were better this year.

Dheeraj Singh of Little Flower Shool, who secured 74th all-India rank, declared that he owed his success to Prerna classes.

The examination pattern this year, pointed out coaching institutes, had been changed and the students had to deal with two combined papers with sections from physics, chemistry and mathematics — as opposed to the earlier pattern, in which students had to face three different papers but one at a time.

This is also the first time that an extended merit list has been declared to enable institutions like Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) to admit students declared successful.

Vikas Munda, student of Navodaya School and son of a teacher, has made it in his second attempt. He had passed out from Navodaya Vidyalaya with 82.2 per cent marks in 2006. Munda also attributed his success to a coaching institute and said Newton Classes helped him crack the exam. Money, he said, was never really a problem as his father has always been supportive.

FIITJEE, Ranchi chapter, claimed 344 of its students appeared in the IIT-JEE examination this year, out of whom, it said, 76 students featured in the merit list and 42 more in the extended list.

Mudit Agarwal, a student of DAV Jawahar Vidya Mandir, Shaymali, also cleared the exam in his second attempt. He attributed his success to FIITJEE.

Sri Chaitanya Coaching Institute’s Ranchi branch claimed that 27 of its students qualified. Ambition Coaching Institute made a more modest claim of five students making it this time. From Pen4Future coaching institute, 12 students are claimed to have qualified, with Rasna Goenka securing AIR of 562.

It is not clear, however, how many students have cracked it in their second attempt and how many have waited for a year, after their school-final exam, to take a shot at IIT-JEE.

Counselling for successful students will be held between June 18 and June 22.