A group of aspiring doctors on Thursday approached the Supreme Court contending that the answer keys of four questions in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test held on May 5 for admission to MBBS and BDS courses in medical colleges across the country were wrong, which jeopardised the career prospects of lakhs of students.
A bench of Justices Indira Banerjee and Ajay Rastogi agreed to hear the writ petition filed by advocate Mahfooz Nazki on behalf of Hyderabad-based Kayathi Rohan Reddy and three others.
The candidates sought a direction to quash the final answer key published on June 5 by the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducted the NEET UG -2019. They sought a direction to the NTA to publish a revised answer key as four of them were “demonstrably and palpably wrong”.
The court which initially declined to look into the matter finally allowed a plea by the counsel to consider it.
The petitioners said that after going through the answer keys first published by the NTA on May 29, they were shocked to find out that a number of questions were wrong. They sent a representation on May 30, pointing out errors in the official answer keys. Subsequently, a revised answer keys were published on June 5.
“To the shock and chagrin of the petitioners, not only did the keys continue to have errors, some answers that had been correctly notified earlier stood changed to a wrong answer,” their petition stated.
Citing the NCERT textbooks, the petitioners contended they were severely prejudiced as the discrepancies in the answer keys remained, marring their chances. The candidates, who sent a fresh representation on June 9, were told that the matter had already been referred to the experts who had published revised answer keys after checking it, their petition stated.