SC to hear plea against combined NEET result

Difference in difficulty levels of questions cited

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to examine a fresh plea for setting aside the combined result of NEET-I and II, held on May 1 and July 24 respectively, on the grounds of different “difficulty levels” of question papers.

A bench of Justices Anil R Dave and L Nageswara Rao has decided to consider next week the petition by Bihar resident and medical aspirant Shivangi Singh, who has figured in the list of successful candidates in the combined result declared on August 16.

The plea made through advocate Manoj Singh contended that the declaration of the combined result without normalising the marks obtained by candidates in NEET-I and II was “illegal and unconstitutional and violative of their fundamental rights under Article 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution”.

It said that treating NEET-I and II conducted on two different dates with two different sets of questions with different difficulty level as one single exam for determining the rank of candidates without applying the “normalisation” formula, amounted to placing NEET-I candidates higher in All India Ranking vis-a-vis candidates from NEET-II with poor score due to difference in difficulty level.

Hearing a separate petition by Bengaluru-based students, the apex court had on August 16 refused to pass an interim direction to the CBSE to publish separate merit lists for CBSE students and their counterparts in state boards in  NEET held for undergraduate medical and dental courses in private colleges all over the country.