6 JEE/NEET Myths That Are Actually Wrong (or Just Outdated)

A lot of JEE/NEET advice gets passed down from senior to junior, coaching batch to coaching batch, without anyone re-checking it against the current actual rule. Some of it was never quite right. Some of it used to be true and quietly stopped being true when a pattern changed. Here are six specific ones, checked.

Myth 1: "Attempting JEE Main's second session is risky if you already did okay in the first"

Reality: this is backwards. NTA automatically takes the better of your two session percentiles for your final rank, not an average, and never the worse one. A weak second attempt cannot pull your first attempt's score down. Attempting the second session is close to a free option: your downside is capped at whatever your best session already earned you.

Myth 2: "Numerical-value questions have no negative marking, so always fill something in"

Reality: this was true when numerical questions were introduced in 2020 and 2021, and stopped being true in 2022, when NTA clarified in a March 2022 notice that a wrong numerical answer costs 1 mark, the same as a wrong MCQ. It has applied in every cycle since. The old advice to always guess a numerical because it was risk-free is years out of date. A blank numerical costs 0; a wrong guess costs -1, and with no options to choose from, a rough guess at an exact value is rarely right.

Myth 3: "NTA Score and percentile are two different numbers on your scorecard"

Reality: they're the same number. NTA Score is just the official name for your percentile as shown on the scorecard. There's no separate NTA Score to compare against your percentile. Checking both "to be sure" just shows you the identical figure twice.

Myth 4: "Negative marking means you should basically never guess"

Reality: too broad. A blind, uniformly random guess among 4 MCQ options is worth +0.25 marks on average under the standard +4/-1 scheme, technically positive expected value, not a loss. The real rule is narrower: avoid guessing specifically when your odds of being right sit below about 20%, not as a blanket policy against every unsure question.

Myth 5: "Age or who registered first breaks a JEE Main tie"

Reality: outdated since 2025. Ties are now broken purely by subject scores (Mathematics, then Physics, then Chemistry) followed by accuracy ratio. Age and application number were removed from the criteria entirely. If you've heard otherwise, that advice predates the change.

Myth 6: "You have to pick either AIQ or your State Quota for NEET counselling, not both"

Reality: false, you can take part in both. All India Quota (run by MCC) and State Quota (run by your state) are separate processes, and if you're eligible for both, you can register for both at the same time. They are not fully independent, though. After Round 3, MCC shares its allotment data with state counselling authorities, and a candidate who joins a seat allotted in AIQ Round 3 can't resign it and is removed from further state counselling, a rule MCC applies to stop the same candidate blocking seats in both systems. Check MCC's current counselling rules before deciding which seat to join in later rounds.

The common thread across most of these: rules genuinely do change, and advice that was accurate two or three years ago can be quietly wrong today without anyone flagging it. When something you're relying on sounds like a fixed rule rather than a strategy, it's worth a five-minute check against the current year's official source before you build your prep around it.