Anand Mahindra, who previously commended the movie 12th Fail and its lead actor Vikrant Massey for his performance, revealed on Sunday that he was motivated to look for additional information about how candidates study for the test and how challenging it is to pass it. An IIT alumnus who had also taken the UPSC exams reportedly informed him that the latter was more challenging while doing this.
The movie 12th Fail, which started the conversation, is based on the life of Manoj Kumar Sharma, an IPS officer who overcame severe poverty to pursue a career as a police officer.
“After seeing 12th Fail I checked around and spoke to several young people about the relative difficulty of our entrance exams. One of them was a graduate of IIT who is involved in a business startup but who has also taken the UPSC exam,” Anand Mahindra wrote on X. “He stated EMPHATICALLY that UPSC is much tougher than the IIT JEE.”
The chairperson of Mahindra Group also shared a post listing the top ten most difficult tests globally, with three from India including IIT JEE at number 2, UPSC at number 3, and GATE at number 8. Mahindra said that if the feedback he received was true then the global rankings should be updated to reflect it.
However, X users’ reactions to the post revealed different perspectives on the examinations.
“One of my relatives cleared IIT in the first attempt and cracked UPSC in 4th attempt. He always says that UPSC is the ‘mother of all exams’,” commented Neetu Khandelwal (@T_Investor_). Another user and government official Rahman Sheikh (@rahmanology) wrote, “The exam itself is not tough but it has 3 stages and every graduate can take it which makes the competition very tough. One small mistake and you are out of the race. But if the difficulty level of question papers is compared, of course, JEE is much tougher.”