Twenty-three candidates have bagged the perfect 100 score in the engineering entrance exam JEE-Main with a maximum of them being from Telangana, the National Testing Agency announced on Tuesday.

Over 11.70 lakh candidates had appeared for the first edition of the crucial exam.

Among the candidates who scored 100 NTA scores, seven are from Telangana, two from Haryana, three each from Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, two from Delhi and one each from Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

According to NTA officials, NTA score is not the same as percentage of marks obtained but normalised scores.

“NTA scores are normalised scores across multi-session papers and are based on the relative performance of all those who appeared for the examination in one session. The marks obtained are converted into a scale ranging from 100 to 0 for each session of examinees,” a senior official explained.

The Examination was held in Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

The Examination was also conducted outside India in Manama, Doha, Dubai, Kathmandu, Muscat, Riyadh, Sharjah, Singapore, Kuwait City, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos/Abuja, Colombo, Jakarta, Moscow, Ottawa, Port Louis, Bangkok, and Washington D.C.

It was conducted in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Oslo for the first time.

While the first edition of the exam was conducted in January-February, the second edition is scheduled in April. Based on the results of JEE-Mains Paper 1 and Paper 2, the candidates will be shortlisted to appear for the JEE-Advanced exam, which is a one-stop exam to get admission into the 23 premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).