NEET UG 2024 | Over 4 Lakh Students To Lose 5 Marks As Supreme Court Asks NTA To Revise Results Based On IIT Delhi Report

While refusing to cancel the NEET-UG 2024 exam for paper leak, the Supreme Court today (July 23) directed the National Testing Agency (NTA) to revise the results by treating the option identified by an expert team constituted by the IIT-Delhi as the correct answer to an ambiguous question.

The NTA had treated two options as the correct answers to this question. Now, the Court has asked the agency to treat only the option approved by the IIT-Delhi team as the correct option. This would mean that the scores of over four lakh students, who had selected that option, will reduce by five (four marks' loss and one negative mark).

The bench of CJI DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra was hearing the issue raised by some petitioners who challenged the decision of the National Testing Authority (NTA) to treat two options as the correct answers to the question. 

The petitioners submitted that as per the instructions issued by the NTA, the students had to follow the latest edition of the NCERT textbook. According to the petitioner, option 4 is the correct answer for Question No. 19 in Test Booklet Code S3. As per the old NCERT syllabus, option 2 is the correct option.

Referring to the 3 member expert committee report constituted by IIT Delhi's Director Professor Rangan Banerjee based on the previous order of the Court, the CJI  observed that the committee's report indicated option 4 as the correct choice. 

The bench directed the NTA to take into account the expert committee's opinion of considering option 4 as the only correct option and revise the NEET-UG exam results with the said modification. 

"Option 2 and 4 are mutually exclusive and both cannot stand together. We accept the report of the IIT Delhi. Accordingly, NTA shall revise the result of the NEET UG 2024 on the basis of option 4 as extracted above as the only correct answer. We have not indicated the number of the question since the number of the question  and the option is likely to vary in view of the procedure which is followed in the exam  " 

It may be noted that 4,20,774 candidates attempted option 2(old NCERT edition answer) and 9,28,379 candidates attempted option 4. The Solicitor General appearing for the Union said that the NTA took the decision to award marks for option 2 after receiving several representations from students who used the old textbooks of their siblings to prepare for the exam. 44 out of 61 students who got 720/720 marks are the beneficiaries of the grace mark awarded for this question. 

Case Details : VANSHIKA YADAV Versus UNION OF INDIA AND ORS. W.P.(C) No. 335/2024 And Other Connected Matters