Supreme Court to hear NEET PG Double Shift matter Next Week
Supreme Court of India
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has listed the plea challenging the National Board of Examination's (NBE) decision to hold the National Eligibility-Entrance Test Postgraduate (NEET-PG) Exam in double shifts for a hearing in the last week of May.
Considering that the NEET PG 2025 exam is scheduled to be conducted in June, the counsel for the petitioners mentioned before the bench of CJI BR Gavai and Justice AG Masih for an urgent listing of the matter, Live Law has reported.
The petitioners' counsel submitted, "This is regarding NEET PG of this year, we are challenging the two exams happening, the process starts in June, kindly have it on Monday."
In response, the CJI was quoted as noting by Live Law, "Will keep it next week."
As per the schedule announced by NBE, the National Eligibility--Entrance Test for admission to postgraduate medical courses is going to be conducted on June 15, and the results for the same will be declared by July 15.
However, currently two pleas are pending before the Apex Court bench challenging NBE's decision to hold the exam in two shifts. One of these pleas was filed by the United Doctors' Front (UDF), and the other one was filed by a group of petitioners, including Dr Aditi.
UDF has prayed that the upcoming PG medical entrance test examination be conducted in a single shift to ensure transparency, uniformity in difficulty levels, and equal standards of evaluation. The association has contended that this violates the aspirants’ fundamental rights under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, specifically the right to equality and the right to a fair, merit-based opportunity.
Both of these pleas have raised doubts regarding the normalisation formula. Medical Dialogues had earlier reported that the normalisation formula, regarding which the aspirants have been expressing their doubts, was introduced to neutralise the effect of tougher or easier papers for NEET PG held in multiple shifts. This formula is used to calculate the score, based on which the merit list is prepared.
The doctors expressed their concerns primarily over the normalisation process. Even though the normalisation formula was introduced for NEET PG 2024 to adjust the scores across different exam shifts to ensure fairness, critics have argued that the process is flawed.
A few candidates who appeared in the second shift of the NEET PG 2024 exam had questioned the normalisation formula adopted by NBEMS and further claimed that the board had scammed them in the name of a competitive exam. They pointed out that the Shift 2 paper was tougher compared to Shift 1 and further termed the process of calculating scores as debatable. These concerns were also raised before the Supreme Court, where the aspirants prayed for transparency in the NEET PG 2024 exam.
Despite the protests and demands from the aspirants to hold the upcoming PG entrance test in a single shift, NBEMS has not yet announced any changes in its plans of holding the exam in double shifts.
In fact, NBE's counsel informed the top court bench that since NEET PG is a super-speciality exam in which around 2.4 lakh candidates appear each year, "the questions at that level of appropriate difficulty are very limited".
Earlier, while considering the plea that challenged NBE's plans of holding the NEET PG exam in two shifts, the Apex Court on May 5 had sought a response from the National Board of Examinations, National Medical Council and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Amid the pending pleas, the demands of doctors for transparency in the NEET PG exam and the opposition against the plans of a double shift test, the Supreme Court issued a 10-point directive to bring reforms in the centralised PG entrance test. Among the other directives to ensure a stop to the practice of seat-blocking in the NEET PG counselling, the top court bench also directed NBE to publish the raw scores, answer keys and normalisation formula of the NEET-PG exams.
Also Read: Supreme Court Issues 10-Point Directives for NEET PG Reform
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