The Supreme Court will hear on Thursday a batch of petitions seeking to cancel the NEET-UG 2024 examination, held on May 5. A bench led by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, will begin hearing the petitions, including those alleging irregularities and malpractices in the test and seeking a direction to conduct it afresh, around 10:30 am.
This comes as the Centre submitted an affidavit before the Supreme Court ruling out any mass malpractice. It said the data analytics of results of NEET-UG 2024 was conducted by IIT Madras and as per the findings given by the experts, the marks distribution follows the bell-shaped curve that is witnessed in any large-scale examination indicating no abnormality. There was also no localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores in NEET-UG 2024, the Centre said in the affidavit.
The NTA filed affidavits pursuant to the directions passed by the Supreme Court on July 8. The bench had sought the responses of the Union/NTA on the extent of the paper leak and the possible segregation of the wrongdoers from others. The court said, though a re-test would be a last option, it may be necessary if the sanctity of the entire exam has been affected.
The Centre and the NTA had earlier field affidavits arguing against scrapping the exams, stating it would be "counterproductive" and "seriously jeopardise" lakhs of honest candidates in the absence of any proof of large-scale breach of confidentiality.
Centre's affidavit
In an additional affidavit filed on Wednesday, the Centre said for 2024-25, the counselling process for undergraduate seats will be conducted in four rounds starting from the third week of July.
The Centre's affidavit said the Ministry of Education requested the Director of IIT Madras to undertake comprehensive data analytics of the result of candidates who appeared in NEET-UG 2024. "It is submitted that pursuant thereto an exhaustive and elaborate technical evaluation of the data pertaining to the NEET-UG 2024 examination was carried out by IIT Madras, using the parameters like marks distribution, city-wise and centre-wise rank distribution and candidates spread over marks-range, and the following findings have been given by the experts of the IIT Madras," it said.
The affidavit said as per findings given by the experts of IIT Madras, there is an overall increase in the marks obtained by the students, specifically in the range of 550 to 720. "This increase is seen across the cities and centres. This is attributed to 25 per cent reduction in syllabus. In addition, candidates obtaining such high marks are spread across multiple cities and multiple centres, indicating very less likelihood of malpractice," it said.
Besides the Centre, the National Testing Agency (NTA) also filed a separate affidavit, claiming it carried out an analysis of the distribution of marks in NEET-UG 2024 at the national, state, city and centre levels.
"This analysis indicates that the distribution of marks is quite normal and there seems to be no extraneous factor, which would influence the distribution of marks," the NTA said. It also detailed the system in place for ensuring the confidential printing of question papers, its transportation and distribution.