NEET UG 2024: Supreme Court says NTA, Centre should avoid flip flops, rectify errors in future

The Supreme Court on Friday said that the Central government and the National Testing Agency (NTA) should take care to ensure that the issues which arose with respect to National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test undergraduate exam for the year 2024 (NEET UG 2024) are not repeated in future [Vanshika Yadav vs. Union of India]..A Bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said that the NTA should avoid "flip flops" with respect to safety of strongrooms where question papers are kept, grant of compensatory marks etc. "We have said that NTA must now avoid the flip flops which has happened now because it does not serve well. These issues such as rear door being kept open in strong room etc, then granting compensatory marks, then grace marks which led to 44 getting 720/720. We have highlighted all errors of NTA and thus committee should identify and rectify these. These issues which have arisen must be rectified by the Union of India this year itself so that it is not repeated," the Court said pronouncing its judgment in the case relating to NEET UG 2024.Nevertheless, it reiterated that there was no systemic breach in NEET UG 2024 exam beyond Hazaribagh and Patna and, therefore no retest would be needed with respect to this year's NEET..The observations were made in the judgment in which the Court turned down the plea to hold re-examination for NEET UG 2024.The Court had on July 23 refused to order a re-examination. At the time, it had held that the evidence before it was not sufficient to show any widespread leaks of question papers as alleged, and any leak was limited to a few students who can be separated from the untainted ones.The detailed judgment on the same explaining the reasons was pronounced today..The admissions to medical colleges across the country for undergraduate courses is based on NEET UG score. The NEET-UG exam this year was marred by allegations of mass question paper leaks and cheating.Several NEET candidates, therefore, had approached the Supreme Court seeking a reexamination. However, there were also students who argued against any retest. The Central government and the NTA had vehemently opposed any retest. The contended that the leak was not widespread but only limited to a few candidates..Timestamp of video showing NEET-UG paper leak was edited; 153 cases of unfair means reported: NTA to Supreme Court.Senior Advocates Narender Hooda, Sanjay Hegde, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, Santosh Paul, Amit Anand Tiwari, Sudhanshu Choudhari, PV Dinesh, Thomas P Joseph, and A Hariprasad appeared for the students.Solicitor General Tushar Mehta appeared for the Union government.Senior Advocate Naresh Kaushik appeared for the NTA.