Expressing its unwillingness to conduct the NEET-UG examination again, the Centre has told the Supreme Court that “scrapping the exam in entirety would seriously jeopardise the lakhs of honest candidates who attempted the question paper in 2024”.
In an affidavit filed Thursday in the top court — it is set to take up on July 8 a clutch of petitions alleging exam paper leak and irregularities in the conduct of the NEET-UG on May 5 and demands for a retest — the Education Ministry makes no mention of a paper leak, only acknowledging that “some alleged instances of irregularities/cheating/ impersonation/ malpractices during the conduct of NEET(UG) 2024 Examination have been reported”.
In a separate affidavit, also filed Thursday, the National Testing Agency echoed the Ministry stand. It said the NEET-UG examination process “is not vitiated and the results do not deserve to be set aside as career prospects of lakhs of students who performed well on their own merits, cannot be jeopardised on account of few sporadic and scattered instances of unfair means attempted by an identifiable number of persons at identified places which are miniscule and insignificant in the context of very large number of meritorious candidates who have performed well”.
The Ministry, in its affidavit, stated that “in the absence of any proof of any large-scale breach of confidentiality in a pan-India examination, it would not be rational to scrap the entire examination”.
“It is submitted that in any examination there are competing rights that have been created whereby the interests of a large number of students who have taken the examination without adopting any alleged unfair means must not also be jeopardised,” it said.
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“Scrapping the exam in entirety would seriously jeopardise the lakhs of honest candidates who attempted the question paper in 2024,” the Ministry said in its affidavit.
This is the first time that the Centre is putting on record its stand on holding a retest of NEET-UG for all 24 lakh candidates. Earlier, in a press conference last month, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had taken moral responsibility for the inconvenience caused to candidates but did not make the government stand clear on holding a retest.
The Ministry, in its affidavit, stated that it had asked the CBI to “conduct a comprehensive investigation into the entire gamut of alleged irregularities including conspiracy, cheating, impersonation, breach of trust, destruction of evidence by the candidates/institutes/middlemen including attempted irregularities” and that the CBI had registered case in this regard.
It said it had also constituted a high-level committee of experts under former ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan “to suggest effective measures for conducting transparent, smooth and fair conduct of examinations by the National Testing Agency”.
The committee, the affidavit said, “shall make recommendations on Reforms in mechanism of examination process, Improvement in Data Security protocols and structure and functioning of National Testing Agency” and will submit its report in two months.
The committee, it said, has already held four meetings and started consultation with stakeholders, especially students, seeking suggestions and ideas online until July 7.
The Ministry said it is committed to ensure the sanctity of examinations and protect the interest of students. “To ensure transparency, fairness, and credibility in public examination, Parliament has enacted Public Examination (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act 2024 on 12.02.2024” with stringent punishment for offences related to unfair means in public examinations, it stated.
The NTA, in its affidavit, said “isolated and sporadic instances of alleged paper leak, which are confined to a very small number of candidates, may not be considered sufficient to impeach and assail the sanctity of NEET (UG) 2024. Even otherwise, a proportionately large number of candidates, who are not involved and do not have any correlation with such incidents, do not deserve to be made innocent victims to suffer the adverse consequences flowing from avoidable re-conduct of the entire examination”.
“The most prominent factor in 61 candidates scoring 720/720 is due to the reduction in the syllabus, which was done to enable candidates to focus on the core concepts and to alleviate the pressure on students who faced challenges in completing their studies due to the pandemic in 2019-20. The syllabus was reduced by approximately 22-25% compared to last year, removing difficult and time-consuming chapters,” the NTA stated.
It described as “completely unsubstantiated” the allegation that the number of students scoring high marks are only from certain centres.
It said “in this regard, the result of top 100 candidates was analysed and it has been reported that they are distributed across 95 centres located in 56 cities within 18 States/UTs of the country. This diverse distribution highlights the widespread participation and competitive spirit among students from different regions and educational backgrounds”.
The NTA said circumstances laid down for cancellation of the entire exam “have apparently and prima facie not arisen, hence the entire examination pan-India involving more than 23 lakh students does not require to be cancelled/set aside”.
The affidavits have been filed days after the Bihar government, in its communication to the Education Ministry, stated that its probe “clearly suggests a paper leak.” Bihar’s Economic Offences Unit, during its investigation, is said to have matched 68 questions (of the estimated 200) retrieved from the burnt remains of a purported photocopy of the question paper with the original one that the NTA shared with it. Based on this, the EOU concluded that NEET-UG was leaked before the exam on May 5.
