NEET (UG)- 2019 Wrong Answer Key: SC agrees to hear the plea of students.

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (generally known as NEET) released the answer key to the NEET-2019 recently. Through this answer key, an all India merit list has to be prepared for the admission of the candidates to the MBBS or BDS courses in various colleges and universities throughout the country. However a petition was recently filed by some NEET aspirants claiming that the answers of five questions in the answer key released by NTA (National Testing Agency) were wrong and the entire paper had to be quashed. 

This petition was filed by four students based in Hyderabad, India viz. Kayathi Mohan Reddy and three others through advocate Mahfooz Nazki. As a matter of fact, they said that the National Testing Agency (NTA) which conducted the exam issued wrong answer keys for certain questions and therefore had put at risk the career prospects and projections of the contenders who sat for this exam. About the petition, verbatim they said^[1], “Pertinently, no option was given to the candidates to file any objections. To the shock and chagrin of the petitioners, not only did the key continue to have errors, some answers that had been correctly notified earlier stood changed to a wrong answer”.

Dr. Abhishek Manu Singhvi who was the senior legal counsel appearing for the petitioners in the court of Law, submitted that the answer key circulated by the National Testing Agency for the NEET exam held on May 5 had quite a few errors. He said the five of the questions having four marks each had more than one correct answer or had an answer which was different from the answer key issued by the NTA. Dr. Singhvi also said that the career of the students will be affected if the mistakes were not rectified and also advocated that a proficient body should be instituted which shall be looking upon the correct answers as the counselling is yet to start from June 19.

The Supreme Court thus on Thursday, agreed to hear this plea of the medical aspirants and a vacation bench comprising of Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Ajay Rastogi decided upon hearing the plea filed by four students who appeared for the exam.

However declining to regale this petition filed by these medical aspirants, challenging the NEET(UG)- 2019 answer key, the vacation bench of the Supreme Court said that it was even more apposite if the petitioners approached the High Court for reprieve. The bench of Justice Ajay Rastogi and Surya Kant legitimated and permitted the petitioners to pull out the petition with permission to avail different remedies. This was after the bench learnt that a new petition filed by a group of students from Kolkata in Delhi High Court was listed on Monday. The honourable bench said in this regard that the NTA had brushed up the answer key based on representations from the students, and hence there seemed to be no ‘mala-fide’ practices going on. “All multiple choice answers cannot be scrutinized by this court. We are not experts. We think somewhere some line needs to be drawn,” the bench said verbatim.

By :-

Shreya Saxena

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