NCERT can’t be blamed for NEET fiasco: DP Saklani
Aksheev Thakur
New Delhi, June 18
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and National Testing Agency (NTA) are at loggerheads over a wrong answer of a physics question that was asked in the NEET-UG examination.
Of the 67 candidates who got a perfect score (720/720) in the 2024 NEET-UG results announced by the NTA, 44 were given grace marks for getting an answer to the physics question wrong. NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani in Mysuru dismissed the NTA’s claims that the wrong answers chosen by the medical aspirants in the examination were based on an incorrect reference in their old Class XII NCERT science textbook.
While addressing the media at the Regional Institute of Education of NCERT in Karnataka’s Mysuru district, Saklani said: “The revised textbooks of NCERT are available at the council’s website in both print and online format. The NCERT is in no way responsible for grace marks fiasco in NEET UG-2024. We do not know why textbooks printed before 2020 were being referred to. There is no truth in the claim made by the NTA.”
In the NEET-UG exam, a multiple choice question on atoms was based on two statements. The first said: “Atoms are electrically neutral as they contain equal numbers of positive and negative charges.” The second statement said: “Atoms of each element are stable and emit their characteristic spectrum.”
The options were as follows: One: First is correct but second is incorrect; Two: first is incorrect but second is correct; Three: both first and second statements are correct; Four: both statements are incorrect.
On May 29, the NTA released its provisional answer key which showed that the first option is correct.
However, students challenged the answer key on the grounds that an old version of the Class XII NCERT textbook inaccurately states that “atoms of each element are stable” while the new book states atoms of “most” elements are stable.
Due to this discrepancy, the NTA said it gave grace marks to all students who marked the third option correct which stated that both statements 1 and 2 are correct.
