NEET-UG row: No indication of 'mass malpractice' in examination as per technical analysis by IIT Madras, Centre tells SC

New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that a technical analysis carried out by IIT Madras on 2024's NEET-UG exam showed that neither was there any indication of mass malpractice, nor were there any local set of candidates being benefitted with abnormal scores.

After the Supreme Court's July 8 order, the Union government stated in an affidavit that IIT Madras was asked to carry out an elaborate and exhaustive technical evaluation of the data on parameters of city-wise and centre-wise marks distribution of candidates.

"The analysis shows that there is neither any indication of mass malpractice nor a localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores", it said.

The analysis, however, recorded overall increase in the marks obtained by students specifically in the range of 550 to 720. This increase is seen across the cities and centres. This is attributed to 25 per cent reduction in syllabus. In addition, candidates obtaining such high marks are spread across multiple cities, indicating very less likelihood of malpractice, the Union government's response said.

The government asked IIT Madras to carry out the exercise as the top court had on July 8 asked the Centre to ascertain if it would be feasible to employ data analytics to identify suspects or suspicious cases, while hearing a batch of petitions seeking re-examination of NEET-UG in view of reports of paper leakage and other malpractices.

With regards to the court's query on any decision at policy level on counselling if any further beneficiary of paper leakage is identified, the Centre said that for any candidate, if it is found that he or she has been a beneficiary of any malpractice, their candidature would be cancelled at any stage during the counselling or afterwards.

The apex court is set to hear a batch of petitions seeking a direction for retest on July 11.

In response to the court's query made on the last date of hearing, the government also said that the counselling process would start from third week of July and would be conducted in four rounds.

It maintained the government was taking solution-oriented approach in the matter to ensure no candidate guilty of malpractice gets any benefit and 23 lakh students are not burdened with a fresh test "merely based upon unsupported apprehensions".

On July 8, the Supreme Court had asked the Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA) to inform about the extent of leakage in the NEET-UG examination paper and provide the time lag between the leakage and the examination held on May 5, 2024, observing that there was no doubt that the sanctity of exam had been compromised.

The court had also said if the segregation between beneficiaries of fraud and untainted candidates is not possible, then retest has to be held.