The Supreme Court will be hearing multiple pleas regarding the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, Undergraduate (NEET UG) 2024 result controversy on July 8. After the NEET result was announced on July 4, several students and other stakeholders knocked the doors of the top court asking for scrapping the grace marks that were awarded to 1563 students due to loss of exam time and more. All such pleas will now be heard on July 8 by a bench comprising CJI DY Chandrachud, Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra. In these pleas, some have alleged paper leak, some have demanded cancellation of full exam and re-conduct of the medical entrance exam, some have asked for investigation into operations of the National Testing Agency (NTA), and more. 📌 The NEET UG 2024 counselling has been deferred. However, the Supreme Court had earlier ruled that the NEET UG counselling should not be delayed and the counselling process should begin on July 6, as scheduled originally. Advocate Mathews J Nedumpara, appearing for the petitioners’ side, had earlier requested the bench to stay the counselling process. However, the apex court refused it. “Let the counselling start, we are not stopping the counselling,” the bench remarked. 📌 On Friday, the Union government also expressed its unwillingness to re-conduct NEET UG in its submission before the Supreme Court. The Centre stated that scrapping the exam entirely would seriously jeopardise the lakhs of honest candidates who appeared for the exam this year. “It is submitted that in any examination there are competing rights that have been created whereby the interests of a large number of students who have taken the examination without adopting any alleged unfair means must not also be jeopardised. Scrapping the exam in entirety would seriously jeopardise the lakhs of honest candidates who attempted the question paper in 2024,” the Ministry’s affidavit states. 📌 Additionally, a fresh plea was also filed by 56 students seeking a direction to restrain the Centre and the NTA from cancelling the controversy-ridden exam. 📌 The Supreme Court had also recently sought a response from the NTA asking if there was any time limit to raise grievances regarding the OMR sheets for the NEET UG candidates. A bench of Justices Manoj Misra and S V N Bhatti issued a notice on a plea made by a coaching institution, Xylem Learning Private Limited, and a few NEET candidates. Appearing for the petitioners, senior advocate R Basant said that several students were aggrieved as they were yet to get their OMR sheets. He also alleged that the OMR sheet calculations are “inconsistent with the calculations done with the answer key”. 📌 Meanwhile, the NTA has refuted allegations that the physics question in NEET UG adversely impacted the candidates because it had two correct options, according to Live Law. To support its arguments, NTA said that the marking scheme announced while releasing the NEET UG notification also said: "If more than one option is found to be correct then four marks (+4) will be awarded to only those who have marked any of the correct options." NTA on July 1 released the result of the retest of the 813 (out of 1563) candidates that was conducted on June 23. The revised scores resulted in a decline in the total number of toppers from 67 to 61, as six of the candidates – whose score jumped to perfect 720/720 after they were awarded grace marks due to loss of exam time – failed to get a perfect score in the retest. However, they repeated high scores upwards of 680. The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET UG) is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and other related courses in government and private institutions across the country. NEET-UG, 2024 was held across 4,750 centres on May 5 and around 24 lakh candidates appeared in the exam.
