How I got the complete IITJEE result list.
Back in 2010, while checking JEE results of Rishav's cousin, I realized a very basic fact: The registration numbers that IIT-JEE examination uses are easily guessable. They consist of a zone code, center code (within that zone) followed by your number within the center. I
This means, with a well written nested loop, it is possible to go through every candidate who is appearing for IITJEE and check whether they got selected or not. I did this (in 2010) and released the results of my work on (now defunct) piratecoders.co.cc. I was the first person to do so, as far as I am aware. People have since done this for other exams as well since then. I released my code on github as well, which is how I presume others did it the next time.
People were amazed, and the list got a lot of publicity via Orkut (communities) and other media.
I released the list next year (2011) as well, but was not the first person to do so. (I didn't know that the results were out for a couple of days).
The next year, we decided to release it under SDSLabs, and were super-ready for it. Super-ready, because we had decided to go one step ahead and brute-force the application form numbers. There is a small time-period, during which you can check up your application form status on the JEE website. We ran this program on multiple computers to get the registration numbers as fast as possible. Doing this from the iitr-internal network also gave us a speed benefit.
This gave us access to all the registration numbers, which means that on the morning the results were released, we didn't have to brute-force through all possible registration numbers, but rather only the valid registration numbers. This is somewhere in the range of 3-4 lac people (300,000-500,000)
This made a large difference in the speed at which we got the results. As such, we had the results ready in a very short time, along with analytics (using data which we got from the application forms)
Finally, some links:
- IIT-JEE Results (On my Blog)
- JEE 2012 Ranklist & Course Allotment (2012 results)
- Source Code for the scraper I used
- Source Code for jee.sdslabs.co
PS: Someone mentioned seeing a pdf floating around. The only time JEE has released its dataset was for the year 2009, and it was released as an access database (.mdb) in response to an RTI application. I assume no one has made an RTI application for the same since. The file used to live here, but is no longer accessible. I've uploaded it to ge.tt in case someone wants to see it. The RTI application response is here.
Update: We have scraped the 2013 JEE Advanced Results as well. They are available at http://jee.sdslabs.co/
This is cross-posted from a question on Quora
