The panel of judges at the Supreme Court made it clear on Friday that there will be no re-examinations or ‘nullifying’ of the originally conducted CBSE’s NEET 2017. In the wake of the plight of a group of students who claim their marks in the exam suffered because of vernacular difficulty, the court says that it would still be ‘very difficult’ put the future of 6.11 lakh students on stake.
This year, 11.35 lakh aspirants appeared for the examination. Of this, 6.11 lakh qualified and rest have to either give it another try next year or will have to look for alternatives.
The panel comprised of three judges- Justices Dipak Misra, A M Khanwilkar and M M Shantanagoudar and declared, “We cannot pass an interim order like this. The admission process must continue.” With this, the bench refused to adhere to the plea of the petitioners which was to ‘nullify’ the original exam and conduct it fresh.
On the other side, the solicitor for Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), Maninder Singh claimed that the exam was conducted in eight vernacular languages besides Hindi and English.“The level of difficulty of questions was the same in all the languages. We will put it in an affidavit that there were two sets of question papers,” advocated Singh, furthermore saying that about 1.48 lakh candidates wrote the exam in vernacular languages and the differences in questions between sets was done to avoid leakage of question papers.
“What has been done is completely unlawful. How can there be all-India ranking when students are given different sets of question papers,” the bench argued, siding with the petitioners and reinstated the court’s June 12 order that the results declaration and admissions should be done after a decision has been made on the matter.
There, nevertheless, persists the command to the CBSE to file its affidavit for the exam in three days and dismissed the latter argument saying “The order is there. We are not vacating it. We will not pass any order today”.
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