Supreme Court: On Friday, the Supreme Court dismissed a petition seeking a postponement of the final NEET-PG 2024 exam scheduled for August 11. The bench, including CJI DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, inferred that rescheduling could be impossible since it may affect the careers of nearly 200,000 students.
Some of the reasons given by the court to decline any adjournment of the examination include the formulation that it is unfair that such a large number of students and their families to be prepared to have their examination only be inconvenienced and their time wasted because few pupils of a class were found to have cheated. CJI Chandrachud said, “We cannot endanger two lakh students and their families for a few people. We do not decide academics, and we do not know who is supporting these petitions.
Originally set to take place on June 23, the NEET-PG exam had already been rescheduled over alleged cheating in other examinations. The new date of August 11 was still problematic for the petitioners, who pointed out that the late allocation of test cities on July 31 caused vast problems. They described the difficulties of unplanned travel, such as the costs of last-minute tickets for a flight or the unavailability of train tickets.
The petitioners also expressed apprehension concerning the logic and fairness of the examination, primarily due to the tests being set for two different batches. They believed that inconsistencies in the level of difficulty of the questions asked between batches resulted in undesirable results. To this effect, they demanded that the normalization formula, through which the test administrators set the degree of difficulty for different question sets with the aim of making the test fairly challenging and harder for all parties involved, should be revealed beforehand to prevent suspicion of attempt at over-challenging the rivals.
However, the Supreme Court did not yield on rescheduling, stressing on the relevance of abiding by the set exam schedule so that academic and professional careers can continue apace.
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