A total of 44 candidates have scored 100 percentile in the engineering entrance exam JEE-Main this year while 18 candidates have shared the top rank, Ministry of Education (MoE) officials said on Tuesday midnight.

The first rank holders included Gaurab Das (Karnataka), Vaibhav Vishal (Bihar), Duggineni Venkata Paneesh (Andhra Pradesh), Siddhant Mukherjee, Anshul Verma and Mridul Agarwal (Rajasthan), Ruchir Bansal and Kavya Chopra (Delhi), Amaiya Singhal and Pal Agarwal (Uttar Pradesh), , Komma Sharanya and Joysula Venkata Aditya (Telangana), Pasala Veera Siva, Karnam Lokesh and Kanchanapalli Rahul Naidu, (Andhra Pradesh), Pulkit Goyal (Punjab) and Guramrit Singh (Chandigarh).

Starting this year, Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)-Main was conducted four times a year to offer flexibility to students and a chance to improve their scores. The first phase was held in February and the second in March. The next phases were scheduled for April and May but those were postponed in view of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that raged through the country affecting lakhs.

The third edition was held from July 20-25 while the fourth edition was conducted from August 26 to September 2.

The ranks of the candidates have been released taking into consideration the best of the four NTA scores in accordance with the policy already made. The examination was conducted in 13 languages -- English, Hindi, Gujarati, Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Over 9.34 lakh candidates appeared in four editions of JEE-Main.