Supreme Court defers NEET UG hearing to July 18

The bench said it has received a status report from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the progress made in the probe into alleged irregularities in the conduct of NEET UG 2024.

This comes a day after the Centre told the Supreme Court that data analytics of the NEET UG 2024 results by IIT Madras found “no abnormality” and show “that there is neither any indication of mass malpractice nor a localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores.

On July 8, the top court had asked whether it would be feasible to use data analytics to identify suspect cases and segregate tainted students from untainted ones to identify if there has been any indication of mass malpractice.

“City-wise and centre-wise analysis was done for two years (2023 and 2024) to find out if there are any abnormal indications. The analysis is carried out for the top 1.4 lakh ranks, given that the total number of seats across the country is around 1.1 lakh. This analysis is granular enough to indicate any abnormality, had a large number of students gotten into high ranks (top 5%), due to malpractice or if students from a particular exam centre or city were benefitted. The analysis shows that there is neither any indication of mass malpractice nor a localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores,” the affidavit said.

“There is an overall increase in the marks obtained by students, specifically in the range of 550 to 720. This increase is seen across the cities and centres. This is attributed to 25% 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.

Meanwhile, students are awaiting an update on the NEET UG 2024 counselling date. The Centre said counselling will be conducted in four rounds starting from the third week of July, and added that if any person is found to have taken part in any of the malpractices “candidature of such person would be cancelled at any stage during the counselling process or even afterwards”.

Over 23.33 lakh students had taken the test on May 5 at 4,750 centres in 571 cities, including in 14 cities overseas. However, the result attracted widespread protests this time over the inflated number of toppers, alleged paper leaks, awarding of grace marks due to a wrong question and loss of exam time, and other irregularities.

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