The numbers #
Every rank-holder, with the number of questions they practised.
| Student | AIR | MCQs practised |
|---|---|---|
Uplakshya Goyal |
3 | |
Aryan Dubey |
7 | |
Madhvan Mahajan |
44 | |
Aditya Kumar |
73 | |
Mihir Patel |
114 | |
Devesh S Agrawal |
123 | |
Panav Saharan |
130 | |
Adi Dhingra |
161 | |
Shaurya Singla |
174 | |
Rudra Pattani |
268 | |
Sudipta Fouzdar |
293 | |
Vaibhav Jindal |
347 | |
Ankit Raj |
534 |
What the spread means #
More questions is not a straight line to a better rank — but nobody here practised lightly.
The temptation with a table like this is to read it as a target: practise 90,000 questions, finish third. It doesn't work that way. Aditya Kumar took AIR 73 on 20,000 questions; Devesh S Agrawal took AIR 123 on twice that. Madhvab Mahajan reached AIR 44 on 12,000 — fewer than eight of the students ranked below him.
What separates them isn't visible in a volume count. Two students can attempt the same number of questions and take entirely different things from them, depending on whether they reviewed what they got wrong or simply moved on to the next one.
The count is a proxy for time spent solving rather than time spent reading. That distinction is the one that matters, and it's the one a chapter checklist can't measure.
The floor, not the ceiling #
The useful signal is the bottom of the range: 8,000 questions.
The lowest count in the group belongs to Vaibhav Jindal at AIR 347, and it is still 8,000 — roughly 44 times the length of the actual paper. Nobody reached a national rank here on a few hundred questions.
Read against the 2026 cutoff, that floor makes sense. Qualifying took 213 marks for UR, but the closing ranks at the colleges most aspirants are aiming for sat in the low hundreds. Clearing the bar and competing for a seat are different problems, and only the second is solved by volume.
If you want a number to plan against, the honest one is the floor rather than the average: 8,000 questions is the least that worked for anyone in this group, and most did considerably more.
Uplakshya Goyal
Aryan Dubey
Madhvan Mahajan
Aditya Kumar
Mihir Patel
Devesh S Agrawal
Panav Saharan
Adi Dhingra
Shaurya Singla
Rudra Pattani
Sudipta Fouzdar
Vaibhav Jindal
Ankit Raj