Can't dole out marks: SC stays Madras HC order awarding grace marks to NEET students

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday stayed an order of the Madurai bench of Madras High Court awarding 196 grace marks to NEET students who had opted to write the examination in Tamil language on account of error in translation.

A bench of Justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara Rao stayed the order and issued notice on a plea of the CBSE challenging the high court order.

The bench posted the matter for hearing after two weeks and asked the parties to come out with a solution to deal with the situation, saying, "We cannot dole out marks in this fashion".

The bench observed that it appears that after the judgment, the students who opted for the Tamil language are in the advantageous position over others.     

The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court had on July 10 ordered the CBSE to grant 196 marks -- 4 marks each for 49 erroneously translated questions -- in the Tamil version of this year's National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test (NEET) to the students who took the exam in the regional language.

Passing the orders on public interest litigation, the high court had directed the CBSE to consequently revise the list of eligible candidates and publish it afresh.

The petitioner, senior CPI(M) leader and Rajya Sabha MP T K Rangarajan had sought full marks for the 49 questions, saying keywords in Tamil questions were wrongly translated from English and this caused confusion among the students.

There were 180 questions with a total mark of 720 in the NEET.

The high court had said that the students who took the NEET for admission to medical and dental colleges in Tamil should be suitably compensated to provide a level-playing ground.

The CBSE conducted the NEET on May 6 in 136 cities in 11 languages, the results of which were announced on June 4. In Tamil Nadu, about 1.07 lakh candidates took the test across 170 centres in 10 cities.