SC stays Madras High Court Order to grant 196 marks to NEET 2018 Tamil students

In a recent development, the Supreme Court of India has put a hold on an order which was released by the Madras High Court which granted a total of 196 marks to the NEET 2018 Aspirants who appeared for the exam in the Tamil language.

This decision was taken by Justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara Rao. According to them, marks cannot be given out in such a fashion because if executed, this will give an undue advantage to the Tamil Nadu aspirants who attempted the NEET 2018 paper.

A notice in this regard has been released by them which challenges the high court order. They also have asked the related authorities to come up with a solution in the next two weeks. CBSE had moved to Supreme Court to challenge the decision by Madras High Court. 

All these activities trail back to a petition which was filed by senior CPI-M leader T K Rangarajan in the Madras High Court. According to him, there were translation errors in total 49 questions of Tamil version of NEET 2018 Paper. Because of these translation errors, there was a state of confusion in the students who appeared for the paper.

He had demanded that the all the students be awarded total 196 marks for the 49 questions which contained the errors. The state court had ordered the CBSE to grant the marks to the students and release a fresh merit list. After this decision, all the counselling for NEET were put on hold.

CBSE, in a counter-argument, had stated that it has been clearly written in the official brochure of NEET 2018 that in case there is a discrepancy in the question for any regional language, the English version of the paper shall be treated as final.

CBSE had conducted the NEET 2018 exam on May 06, 2018 2255 centres in 136 cities across the country.  Today 13.35 lakh candidates had appeared for one of the most competitive entrance examinations. The NEET 2018 results were released on June 04, 2018. The admissions to all the medical and dental colleges is conducted through the NEET 2018 Scores.

Recently, National Testing Agency was introduced as an exam conducting body to relieve CBSE of its duties. After the introduction of NTA, many new changes have been introduced. Now from 2019 onwards, the exam shall be conducted twice in a year. Students will be able to appear for both the attempts. Also, the exam will be conducted in an online manner. For the admission purpose,the best of the two scores shall be used. NEET 2019 with these changes, will be conducted first time in February 2019.