Awarding 196 grace marks

NEET: SC stays HC order

The Supreme Court on Friday stayed an order of the Madras High Court awarding 196 grace marks to those NEET students who had opted to write the test in Tamil language on account of error in translation. The top court said it appears that after the judgment of the Madurai bench of the high court, the students who had opted for the Tamil language are in an advantageous position over others.

A bench of justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara Rao stayed the order and issued notice on a plea of the CBSE challenging the high court direction. The bench posted the matter for hearing after two weeks and asked the parties to come out with a solution to deal with the situation, saying, "We cannot dole out marks in this fashion."

Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh, appearing for the Central Board of Secondary Education, said that the National Entrancecum-Eligibility Test (NEET) examination has been conducted pursuant to the apex court order but due to the high court order, entire counselling of students for admissions in colleges has come to a standstill.

He said that due to the high court order everything will have to be re-done and 24,000 students from Tamil Nadu will now be getting around 750 marks out of 720 marks in total. "This petition before the high court was filed by Member of Parliament T K Rangarajan seeking full marks for the 49 questions, saying key words in Tamil questions were wrongly translated from English and this caused confusion among the students," he said.