NEET UG 2024 Chaos: Over 20 Lakh Students Impacted, What's Next for Medical Aspirants?

The Supreme Court of India condemned the National Testing Agency (NTA) on August 2nd for its inconsistencies regarding NEET-UG 2024.

The bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra slammed India’s premier testing agency and said, “such ‘flip-flops’ in national exams do not serve the interests of the students.”

The Supreme Court’s statement comes amidst a detailed final judgement concerning the controversy surrounding NEET-UG 2024. The apex court, in its hearing, ruled out the move to cancel this year’s examination stating that there was no systematic breach of its sanctity.

The supreme court gave a series of instructions and broadened the scope of responsibilities, to a centre-appointed panel headed by ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan, to probe into the conduct of the examinations to reform it. It also stated that the committee should adopt many advanced technologies to prevent any breaches in the examination.

The committee would be submitting its report on September 30.

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Exam (NEET) helps students secure admissions in medical colleges across the country. It was alleged that this year’s examination was a “scam”, as many felt that it was fraught with paper leaks and inconsistencies with respect to its conduct across many centres. 

This year’s exam saw the highest registration of students in the examination with 23,81,833 students trumping last year’s count of 20,87,449. Reportedly, out of the 23 lakh students who registered this year, 10 lakh students were male, 13 lakh students were female, and 24 were from the third category gender.

The exam was conducted at 4,750 centres across 571 cities in the country, with 13 lakh students qualifying for the exam this year.

When the results were announced on June 4, many students took to the streets to protest the way the examination had unfolded in the country. They claimed they were cheated and robbed of their sincere hard work. It is reported that over that over 20 lakh students were affected by it.

Sixty seven students topped the exam this year with unreasonably high scores of 718, 719 out of 720. More than 1500 students were given grace marks to make up for the loss of time, as they faced issues with questions and mixing up of question papers in Hindi and English in some centres.

The Supreme Court subsequently cancelled the grace marks and provided the affected students with an option to take a retest.

When the allegation concerning the examination came to the fore, MPs including the leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi slammed the examination stating that "NEET is not a professional exam... it is a commercial exam”.

Sitaram Yechury, General Secretary of CPI(M) stated on X that “the NEET-UG scam exposes the Modi govt's failure and the deep-rooted corruption within the education system”.

Alakh Pandey, Founder of Physics Wallah, even submitted a petition raising the concern of the students.

Despite initially dismissing allegations of paper leaks, the union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan welcomed the supreme court’s decision and reiterated the government stand for a 'tamper-free, transparent and zero-error examination system."

The controversy surrounding NEET-UG 2024 did not stop with the examination alone. Right after the NEET-UG 2024 controversy, NTA had to cancel its UGC NET exam, after it had discovered that question papers were circulated in the dark web and Telegram groups for sale.

Earlier, when the CUET UG exam for 2024 was about to commence, many exams had to be postponed at the last moment citing logistics issues and lack of adequate infrastructure to conduct the examination, throwing the students into complete disarray.