The Centre on Thursday told the Supreme Court that the grace marks of 1563 students who appeared for National Eligibility cum Entrance Test Undergraduate 2024 (NEET-UG 2024) will be cancelled and they will have the option to reappear for the exam. The court, after hearing the Centre’s decision, said that a re-exam will be conducted for the 1,563 students.
“A subsequent Committee has made recommendations after deliberations which are placed before us. According to recommendation, scorecards of 1563 candidates will be cancelled and stand withdrawn. A re-exam will be conducted for these 1563 candidates. The results of those who don’t wish to appear will be based on their actual marks without compensatory marks,” the Vacation Bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta said.
“For those who appear for re-test, the May 5 scores will be discarded,” the court added.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) stated that re-test will be notified on Thursday itself and it is likely to be held on June 23. The results of the re-exam should be out before June 30 to ensure that the counselling scheduled for July 6 is unaffected.
Speaking on the issue, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said action will be taken against the culprits in the entire NEET results mess. “The government had put forward its stand before the SC today. It’s about 1,500 students. The government is taking this issue seriously,” he said.
Petitioner and CEO of Physics Wallah Alakh Pandey said that the recent mess has created a trust issue with the NTA. “Today, NTA accepted in front of the Supreme Court that the grace marks given to the students were wrong and they agree that this created dissatisfaction among the students and they agreed that they will remove the grace marks. Re-examination of those 1,563 students who got grace marks will be done on 23rd June or the original score without grace marks would be accepted by the students. NTA agreed in front of the SC that the grace marks they awarded were wrong. The question is if the NTA has other discrepancies that we are unaware of. So, there is a trust issue with NTA. The issue of paper leak is open and hearing on that will continue,” Pandey said.
On questions being raised on the role of the NTA, Pradhan said, “It was after an SC order only in past that the NTA was constituted.”
The court had on June 11 issued a notice to the NTA on a plea demanding a retest for the NEET-UG 2024 owing to suspected paper leaks and irregularities. The plea submitted by ten NEET candidates was examined by the Supreme Court’s vacation bench.
The vacation bench had refused to defer the counselling of qualified candidates for admission to MBBS, BDS, and other programmes.
The NEET-UG 2024 Mess
The NEET-UG 2024 was held on May 5 for around 24 lakh students and the results were announced on June 4, much ahead of its anticipated release date of June 14. Suspicions were aroused when the NEET results showed that 67 individuals, six of whom came from the same or nearby testing centre, achieved a perfect score of 720 marks.
After students filed petitions in the high courts, the NTA had formed a Grievance Redressal Committee comprising examination and academic experts who reviewed the complaints based on factual reports and CCTV footage. They confirmed the loss of exam time and compensated 1,563 candidates with grace marks based on the normalisation formula formulated by the Supreme Court in its June 13, 2018 judgment in a CLAT exam case.
The revised marks for these 1,563 candidates ranged from 20 to 720, with two candidates scoring 718 and 719 due to compensatory marks.
According to an NTA press release, “The loss of examination time was ascertained and such candidates were compensated with marks based on their answering efficiency and time lost, as per the mechanism/ formula established by the Hon’ble Apex Court, vide its judgment dated 13.06.2018”. It also said, “1,563 candidates were compensated…and the revised marks of such candidates vary from – 20 to 720… Amongst these, the score of two candidates also happens to be 718 and 719 marks respectively due to compensatory marks.”
With more students taking the test this year, the NTA has kept the cut-offs unusually high this time. “The cut-off scores are determined based on the overall performance of candidates each year. The increase in cutoff reflects the competitive nature of the examination and the higher performance standards achieved by the candidates this year,” the NTA release said.
‘NEET Should be Scrapped’
Commenting on the Centre’s decision to conduct a re-test for the students who got grace marks, Tamil Nadu Health Minister Ma Subramanian said NEET shoule be scrapped.
Adding that none of the 1,563 students were from Tamil Nadu, he said, “Only students from Rajasthan, Gujarat , Haryana have been given grace marks by the NTA.”
“We will not be approaching the court, but will continue to oppose NEET. We demand the Union Government to scrap NEET following these irregularities. Now not only TN is opposing NEET, there are several other states opposing the exam,” Subramanian added.
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