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Synopsis

The Central government has informed the Supreme Court today that the grace marks given to candidates who got less than the allotted time to write the NEET undergraduate exam 2024 have been cancelled.

A vacation bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta has further been told that these aggrieved candidates will be given the option to retake the exam if they wish to.

It has been decided after a committee meeting held yesterday that all 1,563 candidates who suffered as they got less than the allotted time to write NEET 2024, will be given the option for the re-test and if they choose to take the re-exam, their earlier NEET score will stand cancelled.

National Testing Agency (NTA) has further submitted that the re-test will be held on June 23 and its results would be notified by June 30.

In the last week, the Supreme Court has been flooded with pleas over the NEET UG 2024 examination. A fresh plea was also filed yesterday by Alakh Pandey, questioning the NTA's decision to award grace marks to 1563 candidates due to time loss in NEET -UG examination, leading to shooting up of overall merit list.

"The declaration of result was soon followed by news of number of concerns involving grant of grace marks, abnormally high scores, high number of 100% scores, high cut-off scores etc. Resultantly, candidates started raising number of queries relating to the non-transparency in the manner in which the results had been declared," his plea claimed.

While dealing with a writ petition filed by Shivangi Mishra and others over the alleged leak of the NEET UG paper, a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Ahsanuddin Amanullah also issued notice to the National Testing Agency's (NTA) seeking its response saying the "sanctity of the exam seemed to have been affected".

Another plea has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking a fresh examination of NEET, held on May 5, 2024 for admission to medical colleges across the country, in view of alleged paper leak and other malpractices.

The court, however, had refused to stay the ongoing counselling for admissions. The plea seeking a direction for a fresh examination to admission to undergraduate courses in medical colleges across the country has also been fixed for hearing on July 8, when another such plea is scheduled to come up for consideration.

Said petition has been filed jointly by Abdullah Mohammed Faiz and Shaik Roshan Mohiddin from Warangal and Prakasam districts respectively, who claimed to be members of an organisation, working for assistance and benefit of the students.