NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has issued notices to Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA) regarding a plea seeking a CBI investigation into alleged irregularities and paper leaks in the NEET-UG 2024 examination.
The court has given the Centre and NTA two weeks to submit their responses to the notices.
This development follows the NTA’s decision to withdraw its earlier plan to award grace marks to 1,563 students who were not given the full allotted time to complete the test due to mismanagement.The NTA informed the court that a re-test would be conducted for these candidates.
During the hearing, advocate Kanu Aggarwal informed the bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta that the NTA had revoked its June 4 decision on grace marks and would hold a re-test on June 23. The results of the re-test will be announced on June 30 to ensure that the counselling process, scheduled to begin on July 6, is not disrupted.
Prior to the re-test, the candidates will be informed of their actual scores in the May 5 test, without the inclusion of grace marks. Candidates who choose not to appear for the re-test will retain these original marks.
The 1,563 students were initially awarded grace marks because they were not given the full 3 hours and 20 minutes to complete the test. The decision to award these marks was based on the recommendations of the grievance redressal committee set up by the NTA.
As protests broke out over the decision, a second committee reconsidered the issue and recommended reversal of grace marks.
The entrance test was conducted across 4,750 centres in 571 cities, including 14 cities abroad. Reports of paper leak surfaced after the test and a few arrests were also made.