NEET-UG row: Grace marks given to 1,563 candidates cancelled, students to be given option to take retest on June 23, Centre tells Supreme Court

Satya Prakash

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New Delhi, June 13

Amid allegations of paper leak and other malpractices in the NEET-UG 2024, the Centre on Thursday told the Supreme Court that the grace marks given on account of loss of time to 1,563 NEET-UG 2024 candidates for admission to MBBS, BDS and others courses have been cancelled.

These candidates will be given an option to take a retest on June 23, advocate Kanu Agrawal told a Vacation Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta on behalf of the Centre.

The decision was taken in meetings held by the National Testing Agency (NTA) Grievance Redressal Committee on June 10, 11 and 12 to allay fears of candidates about any possible irregularities, Agrawal told the Bench.

The committee has suggested that the score cards of the affected 1,563 candidates issued on June 4, 2024, will stand cancelled and withdrawn.

“These affected 1,563 candidates will be informed about their actual scores without compensatory marks. Further retest will be conducted for the affected 1,563 candidates. The result of those affected 1,563 candidates who do not wish to appear for the retest will be declared based on their actual marks (without adding compensatory marks) obtained by them in the test held on 5th May, 2024, and the marks obtained by the candidates who appear in the retest will be considered and their marks obtained in the test held on May 5, 2024, will be discarded,” the Bench said, citing the committee’s recommendations.

NTA counsel Naresh Kaushik said that the retest will be notified today itself and would be held on June 23, 2024, and the results would be declared prior to June 30, 2024, so that the counselling likely to start from July 6, 2024, onwards was not affected.

Terming the NTA Grievance Redressal Committee’s recommendations to cancel the grace marks awarded to 1,563 candidates as “fair, reasonable and justified”, the Bench allowed the NTA to proceed to hold the retest on June 23.

Earlier, the top court had refused to stay the counselling process for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and other related courses in more than 700 government and private institutions across India even as it noted that sanctity of the examination had been affected and that it needed answers from the NTA.

Noting that the issue of compensatory marks stood closed, it posted the petitions, including the one filed by PhysicsWallah founder Alakh Pandey for further hearing on July 8 when other petitions on NEET-UG 2024 were scheduled to be taken up.

Around 22 lakh students appeared for NEET-UG 2024 Examination conducted on May 5 by the NTA across 4,750 centres in 511 cities and 14 centres abroad for admission to more than 700 medical institutions.

Following declaration of its results on June 4, counselling of successful candidates for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and other related courses in government and private institutions is to take place across India.

As many as 67 students got a perfect score of 720 out of 720 and some of the Rank 1 holders had the same sequence of roll numbers which raised suspicion of malpractice and irregularities. The majority of them were from the same examination centres in Rajasthan (11), Tamil Nadu (8), Maharashtra (7), Haryana (6) and four each from Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. In 2019 and 2020, there was one topper each while there were three toppers in 2021, one in 2022, and two in 2023.

A large number of students protested in Delhi on June 10 demanding a probe into alleged irregularities in NEET-UG 2024. They alleged that grace marks contributed to 67 students sharing the top rank.