The union education ministry on Saturday formed a committee to analyse the issue of irregularities in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test Undergraduate (NEETUG) 2024. Maintaining that the exam was conducted with integrity and fair procedure, Higher Education Secretary K. Sanjay Murthy assured that there was no compromise in administering the medical entrance exam.
“Out of nearly 23 lakh students who appeared in the exam, only 1,600 candidates who took the exam in six centres have been affected by the controversy," said Murthy. He added that the ministry is still examining whether to hold the exam again or not. “A Grievance Redressal Committee will share the findings after which a decision will be taken," he said.
Even as the ministry probes the allegations of paper leak and other irregularities in NEET UG 2024, the government would have the onus of ensuring fair selection, especially after its assertive stand on “deterring unfair means” during the passage of the Public Examination (Prevention of Unfair Means) Bill, 2024, which was passed by the parliament on February 9 this year. The then Minister for State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Jitendra Singh had said, “We can’t allow vital youth power of this country to be surrendered or sacrificed in the hands of a handful few.”
He had also said that students, examinees and candidates will not be under the purview of the legislation. “It is aimed at preventing organised gangs and institutions that are involved in unfair means for monetary gains, but it protects candidates from its provisions.”
Pro vice-chancellor of a private university said on condition of anonymity, “It will become the immediate responsibility of the new government and the new minister to make sure that the issue is dealt with in all fairness, especially when there are many eyebrows raising firsts in the entire controversy.”
Section 3 of the Act lists at least 15 actions that amount to using unfair means in public examinations “for monetary or wrongful gain”. These include leakage of question paper or answer key or part and colluding in such leakage, accessing or taking possession of question paper or an Optical Mark Recognition response sheet without authority, tampering with answer sheets including Optical Mark Recognition response sheets, providing solution to one or more questions by any unauthorised person during a public examination and directly or indirectly assisting the candidate in a public examination.
The section also lists tampering with any document necessary for short-listing candidates or finalising the merit or rank of a candidate, tampering with the computer network or a computer resource or a computer system, creation of fake websites and conduct of fake examination, issuance of fake admit cards or offer letters to cheat or for monetary gain as illegal acts.
Ever since the results were announced, concerns have arisen over the unexpectedly high cut-off scores, compensatory marks and the number of candidates achieving perfect scores (720/720). There have been a total of around 67 students who secured the AIR rank 1 this year. “It has been found that there are 67 candidates with full marks this year. However, 44 of these 67 are attributed to revision of one Physics Answer Key, for which now two options have been taken as correct,” said the National Testing Agency (NTA) that conducts NEET.
Concerns have also been expressed about eight toppers being from the same examination centre in Haryana, including six perfect scorers and one each with scores of 718 and 719. Besides, the early declaration of the result, the date coinciding with the date of declaration of results of general elections on June 4 has also raised eyebrows, to which NTA clarified, “The results were ready by June 4 and there was no reason to delay the announcement by another ten days. Moreover, NTA has been working towards improving the result declaration time from year to year.”
NEET is conducted for students who want to seek admission to undergraduate courses in medical and dental colleges across India. Approximately 2.3 million candidates participated in the NEET UG test held on May 5 across 571 cities, including 14 centres outside India. The exam sought to fill the 1,08,940 available MBBS seats distributed among more than 700 medical institutions nationwide.
