A week after the Madurai bench of Madras High Court ordered the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to award 196 grace marks to the students who had attempted National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) 2018 in Tamil, the CBSE has moved the Supreme Court against the order.
This move comes ahead of the deadline given by the court to CBSE to revise the rank list based on the changed scores.
The High Court order was issued based on a petition filed by TK Rangarajan, a CPI (M) Rajya Sabha MP. The MP had said that nearly one-third of the question paper was translated wrongly into Tamil and had sought the court to direct the admissions to be held either based solely on the Class XII marks of the students or award 196 grace marks to students who had attempted the exam in Tamil.
He had further filed a caveat in the Supreme Court on Wednesday anticipating the Central Board of Secondary Education’s appeal, seeking a stay on the Madras High Court ruling on NEET.
A bench of Justices CT Selvam and AM Basheer Ahamed had on July 6 pulled up the CBSE for releasing the results despite knowing about the PIL, observing "Why did they do so?"
Hitting out at CBSE, the bench stated that the Board was acting 'autocratic' when it came to errors in the Tamil version of NEET.
In response to the CBSE’s submission, the bench observed, "How do you decide the right answers for the questions based on a majority view? The CBSE is accepting even wrong answers under the pretext of a majority decision. How is it that in Bihar state so many students got through the examination?"
NEET was conducted across India on May 6. Around 24,000 students took the exam in Tamil.
The rank list for medical counselling in Tamil Nadu was released by the TN Department of Health and Family Welfare on June 28. The first round of counselling for admissions to TN medical colleges began on July 1 and ended on July 7.
The cut-off under NEET for the unreserved category this year stood at 119 and the cut-off for OBC, SC and ST stood at 96 out of the total 720 marks.