Why 1563 Candidates Achieved Grace Marks in NEET 2024, How did NTA Decide Number of 1563 Candidates?

The National Testing Agency (NTA) has declared the re-examination for 1563 candidates who got grace marks in NEET 2024 conducted on June 23, 2024. On June 13, 2024, NTA said to the Supreme Court that the 1563 candidates who achieved grace marks in the NEET examination this year, their results will be cancelled and their re-examination will be conducted. The NTA has not submitted any proof explaining why 1563 Candidates have been given grace marks.

The National Testing Agency (NTA) said to the Supreme Court that 6 exam centres in 4 states have been awarded with the grace marks. On average 500 students appeared for the exam at each centre. In this case, the number of candidates affected at each exam centre (6) must be more than 3 thousand.

Alakh Pandey, Supreme Court petitioner and founder of online coaching PW said that “NTA told the court that there was a delay in distribution of papers at some centres in Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Chhattisgarh. However, no information was given about which are these ‘some’ centres. This number of 1563 is completely fake. The actual number of affected students is 2.5 to 3 lakh.”

The National Testing Agency (NTA) informed the Supreme Court about the number of centres but did not inform about the 6 centres identified. The NEET exam this year was conducted in 4750 exam centres, in more than 50 thousand rooms under CCTV surveillance. Alakh Pandey says that it is not at all possible for NTA to check each and every CCTV camera personally, so were grace marks given based only on complaints from examination centres?

After the NEET exam was conducted on May 5, 2024, reports of delays in the NEET exam started coming from various centres. A Kota’s famous teacher and petitioner said, in the case of Nitin Vijay sir, 20,000 candidates have filed digital petitions against the NEET exam this year, 2024. Mainly the complaints were on “loss of time”. On the given matter, Alakh Pandey said, “In the case of the CLAT exam of 2018, the Supreme Court had said that there are many children who do not reach the court, they should also get a chance to file a complaint. When the irregularities in the CLAT exam came to light, it was initially said that 25 children were victims, while in the end, the number came out to be more than 5 thousand. In such a situation, the correct number in the NEET case will also be more than 2 lakh.”

Out of 67 NEET toppers, 6 were from Haryana’s Hardayal Public School Centre. Two candidates from this centre got marks like 718 and 719 which are impossible to be gained as per the NEET marking scheme. As per the information from the NTA side, due to some sort of confusion at the exam centre, the wrong sets of question papers were distributed to the candidates. Because of this situation around 37 minutes of the candidates were wasted. Therefore, NTA has given grace marks to the candidates on the basis of time loss during the examination. NTA has said, “We have used the 2018 judgment of the Supreme Court which says that in case of time loss, you can give grace marks by calculating the answering efficiency.’ But NTA did not say how many grace marks have been given for how much time lost.”