 "NEET-UG 2024: Supreme Court directs NTA to publish results by Saturday noon")
The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the National Testing Agency (NTA) to declare centre- and city-wise results of this year’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-UG (NEET-UG).
This must be done by Saturday noon after masking the identities of aspirants.
The order to declare the results came as counsel for the petitioners complained of not being able to ascertain the centre-wise marking pattern since NTA had not published the results of all candidates.
“The petitioners have submitted that it would be appropriate if the results of the NEET-UG 2024 exam are published on the website so as to bring about some transparency on the centre-wise marks obtained by candidates,” the court said in its order.
On the issue of re-examination, the three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, asked the petitioners to show that the paper leak was ‘systemic’ and affected the entire examination.
The Bench added that any order for conducting the paper afresh has to be on concrete conclusion that the sanctity of the entire process was affected.
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“The idea of somebody doing this is not to make a national charade of the NEET exam. People were doing it for money. Therefore, anybody who is making money out of it won’t circulate it on a mass scale,” the court said during the hearing.
The Centre and the NTA, in their earlier affidavits to the apex court, had said that scrapping the exam could be counterproductive.
They added that it would “seriously jeopardise” the career of honest candidates in the absence of any proof of large-scale breach of confidentiality.
The Supreme Court also said a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is on.
“If what the agency has told us is revealed, it will affect the investigation, people will become wise,” it stated.
The top court will resume hearing the arguments on July 22 on a batch of pleas seeking cancellation, re-test and a court monitored probe into the allegations of large-scale malpractices in the test held on May 5.
The apex court’s directions come amid the controversy surrounding the pan-Indian medical entrance examination following allegations of malpractices, mass question paper leaks, and cheating.
The medical entrance examination was taken by around 2.3 million students at 4,750 centres across the country and 14 cities overseas.