 "NEET-UG 2024: Supreme Court defers paper leak case hearing to July 18")
The Supreme Court on Thursday deferred the hearing on a bunch of pleas concerning irregularities in the conduct of this year's National Eligibility-Cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) to July 18, noting that some of the parties had not received the affidavits filed by the Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA).
The bench led by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud also stated that counsels for all parties needed time to apply their minds to the responses before arguments.
During the brief hearing, the bench also said that 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.
In an additional affidavit filed in the apex court on Wednesday, the Centre submitted a data analytics report of NEET-UG 2024 results conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, stating that there was neither any indication of ‘mass malpractice’ nor a localised set of candidates benefiting from it and scoring abnormally high marks.
The report's assertion assumes significance in view of the observations made by the top court on July 8 that it may order a re-test if there were any large-scale malpractices in holding the exam on May 5.
The medical entrance examination conducted by the NTA was taken by around 2.3 million students at 4,750 centres across the country, including in 14 cities overseas.
The Centre's fresh affidavit said experts from IIT Madras have found that the marks distribution follows a bell-shaped curve that is witnessed in any large-scale examination, indicating no abnormality.
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"The analysis shows that there is neither any indication of malpractice nor a localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores," the Centre told the court.
The affidavit also stated that the 2024-25 counselling process for undergraduate seats will be conducted in four rounds starting from the third week of July.
The NTA also filed a separate additional affidavit on similar lines and said it has carried out an analysis of the distribution of marks at the national, state, and city levels, along with giving details of the system in place for ensuring confidential printing of question papers, their transportation, and distribution.
"NTA had also carried out an analysis of the distribution of marks of candidates in NEET(UG) 2024 at National, State, and City levels and also at Centre level. The 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.
The Centre and the NTA, in their earlier affidavits filed in the apex court, had said that scrapping the exam could be counterproductive and ‘seriously jeopardise’ lakhs of honest candidates in the absence of any proof of large-scale breach of confidentiality.