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Students countrywide protesting NEET-UG 2024 mismanagement: unprecedented scale

sympathisers. This is substantiated by NTA suffering em- over unprecedented grades inflation, NTA disclosed that
barrassment ab initio for glitches while conducting national 1,563 examinees (including 44 of the 67 perfect scorers)
examinations written by thousands of students clamouring had been awarded “grace marks” to compensate for “loss of
for admission into the country’s much-too-few acceptable time” complaints during the single national pen-and-paper
quality higher education institutions. test held on May 5.
In NEET-UG 2020 it incorrectly declared a student in Unsurprisingly, dozens of writ petitions have been filed
Madhya Pradesh had scored only 6 marks in the exam, an in the Supreme Court by students and coaching institutes
egregious error that drove her to suicide. Later, NTA is- demanding a thorough and independent investigation of
sued a clarification that she had scored 590, provoking a NTA’s mismanagement of NEET-UG 2024. In particular
huge public outcry. In 2022, NTA was widely criticised for the media and independent investigators have highlighted
mismanagement of the IIT-JEE (Main) 2022 examination that grace marks had been awarded only to students who
during which “technical issues” resulted in abnormally low wrote NEET-UG in six centres in Delhi, Haryana and Chat-
scores for many students. The agency also drew heavy flak tisgarh whereas the exam was written in 4,750 centres in 29
for bungling the inaugural Common University Entrance states and seven Union territories. Even as this puzzle was
Test (CUET) introduced in 2022 for admission into the being deciphered, whistleblowers on social media reported
country’s 56 Central government universities. a NEET exam paper FIR (first information report) filed in
However this time round, the scale of NTA’s misman- Bihar and a police complaint against ‘centre fixing’ filed in
agement of NEET-UG 2024 in which 2.4 million students Godhra, Gujarat.
competed for a mere 1 lakh medical college seats is unprec- On June 13 the NEET-UG entrance exam mess became
edented. For the first time, 67 school-leavers scored a per- messier. NTA informed the Supreme Court that it has can-
fect 720 (cf. two in 2023) with several thousand awarded celled the grace marks awarded to 1,563 candidates and
distinction scores of 650-720. offered them a re-test option on June 23. While accepting
This steep grades inflation and consequent high cut-offs NTA’s decision, the two-judge bench rapped the agency
stipulated by 706 medical colleges countrywide have dashed for violating the “sanctity” of the exam and recommended
the hopes of several thousand teens of qualifying as medical stringent punishment “even if there is 0.001 percent negli-
practitioners. Moreover, following extensive public protests gence on the part of anyone”. However, the apex court de-

JULY 2024 EDUCATIONWORLD 63