Why NTA withdrew ‘grace marks’ awarded to 1,563 NEET candidates

Why were grace marks awarded in the first place?

After the exam on May 5, many candidates filed writ petitions before the High Courts of Punjab & Haryana, Delhi, and Chhattisgarh, alleging that they were not given enough time to complete. Exams started late in select centres — two in Chhattisgarh, and one each in Meghalaya, Surat, Haryana’s Bahadurgarh, and Chandigarh.

A Grievance Redressal Committee (GRC) set up by the NTA to look into these allegations found merit in the students’ grievances, and suggested that affected candidates be compensated for the time lost. They advised that the same normalisation formula be adopted which had been approved by the Supreme Court in relation to the CLAT examination in 2018, whene something similar had occurred.

Based on this, the NTA awarded grace marks to 1,563 candidates. Six of them, however, ended up getting a perfect 720/720 due to this, making them NEET-UG All-India toppers. After the results were announced, several students and other stakeholders approached the NTA and the Supreme Court, alleging that this was not a fair way to deal with the situation.

On June 8, the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the NTA set up a high-powered committee (HPC) to review the results of the 1,563 candidates in question.

What did the HPC recommend?

The HPC, which was asked to submit appropriate recommendations within seven days, comprised the four senior experts: NTA Chairman Prof Pradeep Kumar Joshi, Prof T C A Anant, Prof C B Sharma, and Dr (Prof) B Srinivas.

After holding meetings on June 10, 11, and 12, the panel suggested that the normalised scores of all 1,563 candidates be cancelled and withdrawn. It said that the impacted students should be informed of their actual scores (without grace marks) through their registered email IDs, and also be given the opportunity to appear for a re-examination. Those who do not wish to appear for this retest, should be awarded their actual marks in the test conducted on May 5. Those who do appear for the retest would have their previous score invalidated. The NTA accepted these suggestions.

What was the HPC’s rationale behind these recommendations?

The HPC concluded that the GRC had failed to consider a few points while adopting the normalisation formula of the CLAT 2018 Supreme Court verdict.

In its report submitted to the NTA, a copy of which is with The Indian Express, the HPC states that the GRC did not consider the fact that unlike computer-based tests, OMR-based exams such as NEET-UG do not have an automated system for time assessment (i.e. the timestamp of an examinee’s activities during the exam).

The NTA had determined the time lost by candidates (due to delays on the part of the NTA’s invigilators and staff) based on reports from exam invigilators, staff, observers, and the examination of CCTV footage. This, the committee felt, did not provide a level playing field in terms of determining the time lost across six centers.

Moreover, the HPC noticed that the GRC’s recommended formula to compensate candidates for the time lost did not take into account that the compensation only had to be done for unattempted questions. This led to a “skewed situation” in which many candidates ended up scoring very high marks.

Thus, the HPC concluded that the “most appropriate, fair and reasonable solution to the issue would be to subject 1563 candidates to a retest at the earliest possible.”

What happens now?

The NTA will now conduct a retest for these 1,563 candidates, and any other student for whom the directions of re-examination have been/ will be passed by Courts in individual cases filed. Official communication will be shared with the affected students via their registered email addresses, and fresh admit cards will soon be issued. Results for the retest will be announced on or before June 30.

The NTA also plans to start the registration process for NEET-UG in advance, next year onwards. “This time, we started the process a month ago, but now we will start much sooner to ensure we have enough buffer time between the registrations and the exam day to ensure that there’s better planning as far as selection of test centres is concerned,” a senior NTA official told The Indian Express.

More importantly, the NTA will focus more on better training for all the invigilators and officers involved to avoid the kind of delay experienced in six test centres this year. “We conduct training every year, but from now onwards we will put more focus on it. NTA’s focus is on ensuring such situations do not arise in the future,” the official added.