Exam does not judge quality of doctors! Delhi HC junks plea against reduced NEET PG 2025 cutoff percentile
Delhi: The Delhi High Court recently dismissed a plea challenging the lowering of qualifying cut-off marks in NEET PG 2025 for admission to PG medical courses for academic year 2025-26.
Filing the public interest litigation, the petitioner claimed that a low cut-off would compromise the quality of medical professionals joining the specialisation courses, endangering human lives.
A bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhayay and Justice Tejas Karia, however, said the purpose of higher education was development of further skills and not to judge the quality of doctors.
It also questioned the petitioner on the numbers of doctors required in the country and said it would let seats remain vacant.
"Will it be in public interest to leave the seats vacant? No, we will not permit," remarked the bench.
"The only argument we can gather is (that) lowering this cut off marks will send MBBS doctors with less competence to pursue their postgraduate studies. What is the purpose of granting higher education? The purpose is to make them more skilled in an area. This exam does not ipso facto judge the quality of a doctor," it said, quotes PTI
The court stated that NEET PG only "sorted" MBBS graduates, who are anyway entitled to practice allopathy, for admission to a specialised course, which they would have to eventually pass.
The counsel for the respondent authorities said the regulations permitted lowering of the cut-off to fill vacant seats in an academic year by increasing the pool of candidates.
He said after the completion of the second round of counselling, there were thousands of seats vacant nationwide and a lesser cut-off would allow those lower in the merit list to opt for certain streams that are otherwise not sought after.
Third round of counselling pursuant to the lowered cut-off was going on and the policy decision of the government has therefore been implemented, he said.
He also said a similar petition filed in the Supreme Court was yet to be listed there.
With over 18,000 postgraduate medical seats across the country remaining vacant, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) revised the qualifying percentiles for NEET-PG 2025 admissions this month.
Medical Dialogues had recently reported that a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) petition has been filed in the Allahabad High Court challenging the recent decision of the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) to lower the NEET PG cutoff percentile.
NBE in a notice dated 13.01.2026, reduced the minimum qualifying percentile cut-off for counselling of the third round of National Eligibility-Entrance Test Postgraduate (NEET-PG) 2025-2026 for various categories of candidates.
The cut-off was reduced to zero from 40 percentile for reserved categories -- which made even those scoring as low as minus 40 out of 800 to take part in the third round of counselling for PG medical seats.
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