NEET: Madras High Court dismisses appeal against order on re-examination

Chennai: The Madras High Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal from a set of medical aspirants against a single judge order refusing re-examination of NEET, saying any such move would severely affect over two million students.

S Sai Priya and 11 others had preferred the appeal against a June 6 order where the HC had dismissed a batch of petitions that sought to restrain the National Testing Agency (NTA) from declaring the results.

In their petitions, Priya and other students also sought a direction to the NTA to conduct re-examination for candidates, who had experienced power outages at four centres in Chennai, where they appeared for the examination.

On Thursday, a Division bench of Justice J Nisha Banu and Justice M Jothiraman dismissed the appeal.

"It is to be noted that the integrity of the exam is particularly ensured through human supervision including the presence of the Centre Superintendent, Invigilators, NTA appointed Observers and City Coordinator. All these officials have examined and confirmed that the examination was conducted smoothly. A factual enquiry was undertaken by the NTA and the enquiry was conducted with regard to the field verification through the reports of the examination functionaries and an independent statistical analysis of candidate performance data," the bench said.

It said statistical analysis was conducted by an independent expert committee and it carried out an analysis based on anonymised data relating to the average number of questions attempted by the candidates at the said centre, and comparisons with other centres in Thiruvallur District are statistically comparable across the centres in the district, where the examination was conducted smoothly.

"This analysis found no statistically significant difference in the number of questions attempted, confirming that the alleged power outage did not materially impact candidate performance. Furthermore, NEET (UG) 2025 is a time sensitive and large scale national examination," the court said.

It was crucial to uphold the integrity of the educational assessments in conducting examinations and "this Court cannot sit in an appellate jurisdiction against the considered decision of the speaking order passed by the NTA, after field verification of examination centre and statistical analysis by an independent expert committee with no affiliation to the NTA, unless such decision is demonstrated to be manifestly arbitrary, mala fide or illegal."

"In such circumstances, if any re-examination is permitted, the same would severely affect more than two million candidates. Therefore, we do not find any reason to interfere with the order impugned and the writ appeal lacks merit and the same is liable to be dismissed. In the result, this writ appeal stands dismissed," the court ruled.