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Supreme Court asks IIT-Delhi to solve ‘ambiguous’ question from NEET-UG Physics paper
The answer given by three experts will impact the total marks of over 4 lakh candidates, including 44 students who scored perfect scores
Students wait outside during the hearing regarding the alleged irregularities in NEET-UG 2024 in the Supreme Court, in New Delhi on July 22, 2024
| Photo Credit: ANI
The Supreme Court on July 22 asked the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi Director to assign three of its finest professors to solve a tricky and “ambiguous” question in the NEET-UG 2024 exam’s Physics paper within 24 hours and report back.
Their answer would impact the total marks of over four lakh candidates, including 44 students who scored perfect scores in the exam.
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The order came at the end of a day-long hearing of petitions seeking a re-examination amidst allegations of question paper leaks and other irregularities, which have plagued NEET-UG 2024 and thrown a pall of shadow over the future of over 23 lakh students who appeared in the exam on May 5.
Two ‘correct’ answers
The NEET question under the lens deals with two statements about the nature of atoms. The first statement is “atoms are electrically neutral as they contain equal number of positive and negative charges”. The second is “atoms of each element are stable and emit their characteristic spectrum”. The students were given four options on the correctness of the two statements.
Over 4.20 lakh students went for the second option, which was correct according to an old version of the standard National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) textbook, while 9.28 lakh students chose the fourth option as their answer, which is right according to the new edition of the NCERT textbook.
Petitioners have argued that two answers cannot be right. The National Testing Agency (NTA) cannot give full marks to both answers. The NEET instruction has been to select the correct answer according to the latest NCERT edition. Forty-four students got perfect scores because the NTA chose to grant them grace marks for this ambiguous question.
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“By giving marks to the second option, you (NTA) went against your own rule that the old edition cannot be followed… On the other hand now, 4.20 lakh students would lose four marks and also get one negative mark each if the second option is treated as wrong,” Chief Justice Chandrachud observed orally.
Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, for NTA, justified giving grace marks to those who chose the second option, saying these were poor children who may have borrowed their older siblings’ textbooks to study for NEET.
A counsel appearing for one of the petitioners said she had personally searched high and low for an old edition, that is, pre-2018 edition, but had found none available.
To resolve the conundrum, the Bench has sought the expertise of the IIT-Delhi. “We request the Director at IIT (Delhi) to constitute a team of three experts of the subject concerned. The expert team is requested to formulate its opinion on the correct option for the above question and remit its opinion to the Secretary General of this court, preferably by noon on July 23, 2024,” the court recorded in its order.
Paper leaks
The hearing witnessed the Bench repeatedly ask the petitioners, represented by senior advocates Narendar Hooda Sanjay Hegde, advocate Mathew Nedumpara and Charu Mathur, if they had any contemporary evidence to show the question paper leaks had spread across other States.
The Bench said the issue of paper leaks and the fact that there were systemic flaws in NEET process, affecting the credibility of the exam, were two different compartments.
On arguments that some candidates had inexplicably travelled to other States, in one case from Godhra in Gujarat to Belgaum in Karnataka, to appear for NEET, the Chief Justice countered that there were many exams in which students opt for certain centres on the belief that the marking was lenient there.
“Is students opting for out-of-the-way centres reason enough to cancel the entire exam?” the Chief Justice asked.
The NTA faced tough questions from the Bench on the distribution of wrong question papers in eight centres, including in Jhajjar, and later the award of grace marks for this reason to students.
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