New Delhi, June 21 (UNI) The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the National Testing Agency on a plea by a student alleging that one of the questions framed by the NTA for the NEET-UG 2024 exam was “ambiguous” as it had two correct options.The NEET-UG candidate argued that the “ambiguous question” framed by the NTA, caused an inconsistency between the instructions given in the examination question booklet and the answer key published by the NTA on May 30.
The petitioner said she had left the ambiguous question unattempted to avoid negative marking and loss of rank as it contained two correct options which was against the NTA’s instruction of having only one correct option mentioned in the question booklet.
The petitioner sought the court’s intervention to direct the National Testing Agency to correct and re-publish the NEET (UG) 2024 results, ranks, and percentiles based on the revised marks.
The instructions printed on the examination question booklet mentioned that each question had only one correct option. However, it is the case of the petitioner that Question No. 19 in Test Booklet Code S3 had two correct options i.e., options 2 and 4. Therefore to avoid negative marking the petitioner left question 19 unattempted and took the risk of letting go of a question instead of losing marks on account of negative marking.
The petitioner further argued that the results declared by the NTA considered both options 2 and 4 of Question 19 as correct which is contrary to the instructions printed on the question paper booklet.
The counsel for the petitioner requested the court to list the matter before the start of the counseling, but the court refused to do so and posted it on July 8. The court also tagged it with the other pending petitions.
The vacation bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and SVN Bhatti after hearing the plea observed that the admissions will be subject to the outcome of the petitions and if the exam is set aside, then consequentially, the counselling will also be invalidated.
