CBSE TO DECLARE NEET RESULTS IN TWO WEEKS AFTER SC NUDGE

NEW DELHI: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will declare by June 26 the result of an exam for admission to the country’s medical and dental colleges after getting the go-ahead from the Supreme Court on Monday, bringing relief to more than a million students.

The Supreme Court stayed a Madras high court order that restrained the CBSE from declaring the result of the National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) 2017. “After the court’s go-ahead we have started the process of preparing the result... We will declare the results within two weeks,” a CBSE official said.

The board would have to put online more than a million answer sheets and the process would take a few days but the result would be out not later than June 26, the official, who didn’t wish to be identified, said.

A vacation bench of justice Prafulla C Pant and justice Deepak Gupta accepted the CBSE’s argument that if the stay was not vacated, college schedules would be thrown out of gear.

“The high court shouldn’t have easily and liberally interfered with the schedule,” the bench said of the May 24 order.

The top court said the result, counselling and admissions would be conditional to its decision on matters pending before it, as it asked high courts not to entertain petitions relating to NEET. The CBSE had on June 9 sought an immediate stay on the Madras high court’s interim order that came on a bunch of pleas that alleged the question paper was not uniform and there was a vast difference between the ones in English and in Tamil.

Similar pleas were filed in other high courts. The petitioners demanded the test, which was held on May 7, be conducted afresh with “uniform question papers”. The question papers in regional languages and English were different but the difficulty level was identical, the CBSE told the court. NEET is conducted for admissions to under-graduate medical (MBBS) and dental (BDS) courses.