NEET PG 2025 Double Shifts: Supreme Court issues Notice to Centre, NMC, NBE
Supreme Court of India
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has issued notices to the Union of India, National Medical Commission (NMC), and the National Board of Examinations (NBE) on the plea challenging the National Eligibility-Entrance Test Postgraduate (NEET-PG) 2025 examination being held in double shifts.
Filing the plea, the United Doctors' Front sought 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.
Issuing notice to the authorities, the bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and K.V. Viswanathan sought responses from the Centre, NBE and NMC (National Medical Commission), and posted the matter next week for further hearing, reports IANS
Medical Dialogues had earlier reported that the plea by the United Doctors' Front (UDF), filed under Article 32 of the Constitution, challenges the arbitrary and non-transparent decision of the National Board of Examinations (NBE) to the upcoming NEET PG 2025 exam, in two shifts with different question papers, using a disputed normalisation process for result calculation.
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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, the association mentioned in a release.
Medical Dialogues had earlier reported that a recent public survey conducted on the social media platform by UDF revealed that more than 2,513 NEET-PG aspirants anticipated, and a remarkable 96% of respondents demanded that the examination be conducted in a single shift to ensure fairness, transparency, and uniform evaluation. Raising this demand, UDF recently urged the Union Health Minister, Shri J.P. Nadda to reconsider the decision to conduct the PG medical entrance test in two shifts.
Previously, raising concerns about the multiple-shift exam format for NEET PG, UDF had highlighted the issues if normalisation discrepancies, legal complexities, and loss of candidate confidence.
Doctors across the country have been upset over the conduct of the upcoming NEET PG 2025 exam after the NBEMS announced that it would be held in two shifts on June 15, 2025. While the first shift is scheduled from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM, the second shift is scheduled from 3:30 PM to 7:00 PM.
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. Meanwhile, the plea alleging a lack of transparency in the NEET PG 2024 exam is still pending before the Supreme Court.
