Quashing of NEET-I & II combined result sought

The legal battle over the single- window medical entrance test, NEET, seems to be unending, with the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreeing to hear a fresh plea seeking setting aside of the combined result of NEET-I and II on grounds of different ‘difficulty levels’ of question papers.

The fresh petition alleged that National Entrance and Eligibility Test (NEET)-II was tougher than the earlier one and CBSE came out with a common result without ‘normalisation’ or rationalisation of marks obtained by the medical aspirants in these two tests.

The plea, filed by a Bihar based medical aspirant Shivangi Singh who has already been selected in the combined result, was mentioned before a bench of Justices A R Dave and L Nageswara Rao for urgent hearing. The bench agreed to hear the matter along with the other pending petitions on the issue next week.

"Set aside/quash the combined result of NEET-I and NEET -II (UG) for Sessions 2016-2017 prepared and declared on August 16, 2016 by CBSE by combining raw scores of candidates treating the same to be a single test and direct CBSE to prepare All India Merit List/rank on percentile basis after adopting 'normalisation' method for NEET-I and NEET-II test conducted on May 1 and July 24," the plea filed through advocate Manoj Singh said.

The plea said the declaration of combined result without normalising the marks obtained in by candidates in NEET-I and II was “illegal and unconstitutional and violative of their Fundamental Rights under Article 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution”.