SC stays order awarding grace marks to NEET students

The Supreme Court on Friday stayed a Madras High Court's order for allocating 196 grace marks to students who wrote the NEET UG 2018 in Tamil.

A bench of Justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara Rao primarily accepted the plea by the CBSE, represented by Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh, who contended that with the high court's order to grant extra marks for “ambiguity” in 49 questions to all students who took the exam in Tamil language, some of the candidates might get scores beyond the total marks of 720.

Senior advocate Sidharth Luthra and CPM leader T K Rangarajan, who filed the PIL in the high court, submitted that the CBSE had done nothing even after admitting that there were some errors in the question paper. He said the normalisation of scores has to be done and the candidates must be given proportionate marks.

Singh, for his part, said English is mandatory for studying MBBS and all those students have studied English as a subject in their class 12.

The court issued notice to the PIL petitioner and put the matter for further consideration after two weeks. The bench asked the parties to come out with solution saying, “we cannot dole out marks in this fashion”.