The Supreme Court on Thursday adjourned for July 18 the hearing on a batch of petitions seeking cancellations of NEET-UG 2024 exam on the grounds of paper leak and other irregularities that took place in the conduct of the examination on May 5 in which 23,33,287 candidates appeared.

Adjourning the hearing for July 18, a bench comprising Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice Manoj Misra, noted that some of the parties in the case haven’t received the affidavits filed by the Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA) and they need to prepare their responses to the affidavits before arguments commences.

Denying any mass malpractice in the conduct of NEET-UG 2024 exam, the Central government in its affidavit, filed on July 11, has said that the data analytics done by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, shows that there is neither any indication of mass malpractice nor a localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores.

Apparently, this is in reference to 67 candidates scoring perfect 720 marks. In 2020 one student scored perfect 720 marks, three in 2021, one in 2022, two in 2023.

The NEET-UG is of 720 marks with 45 questions each of Physics, Chemistry, Botany and Zoology. Each question has four marks and for every wrong answer there is a negative marking of one mark (-1).

The Central government also said that the counselling will be conducted in four rounds starting from the third week of July.

Assuring that wrongdoers would not be permitted to go scot-free, the central government has said, “For any candidate, if it is found that he/she has been the beneficiary of any malpractice, the candidature of such person would be cancelled at any stage during the counselling process or even afterwards.”

Terming as fake the video showing a photo of the NEET-UG paper leaked on Telegram on May 4, the National Testing Agency in its affidavit has said, “The timestamp was manipulated to create a false impression of an early leak.”

Stating that it has carried out an analysis of distribution of marks of candidates in NEET-UG 2024 at National, State and City level, the NTA has said, “This analysis indicates that the distribution of marks is quite normal and there seems to be no extraneous factor, which would influence the distribution of marks”

In the last hearing of the matter on July 8, while observing that the NEET-UG 2024 was compromised by paper leak and “We should not be in state if self-denial as it only adds to the problem, the Supreme Court had directed the National Testing Agency to make full disclosure about the nature of leak, places where the leak took place and the lag of time between leak and conduct of the exam that took place on May 5, 2024 in which 23,33,287 candidates took the exam.

The top court had also asked the NTA to state when the leak first took place? the manner in which the leaked question papers were disseminated and the lag of time between occurrence of leak and the conduct of examination exam on May 5, 2024.

The court had further directed that the NTA shall inform about the steps taken by it to identify beneficiaries of the leak, identify the centres/cities where leak took place and the modalities followed to identify beneficiaries of the leak.

Besides seeking information from the National Testing Agency, had also directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to file a status report on its investigation and the material that has come to light as of today.

“We are also of the view that CBI shall file a status report before this court on the status of investigation as on today and material which has come to light till today”, the top court had said in its order on July 8, 2024.