On Friday, the Supreme Court instructed the National Board of Examinations (NBE) to organize the NEET-PG exam for all 2.4 lakh candidates in a single session, rather than in two separate shifts as initially planned for June 15 across 900 centers in India.
A bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Kumar, and N. V. Anjaria expressed disapproval of the two-shift format, stating that it could lead to discrepancies in the level of difficulty between different sets of question papers. The court emphasized that this variation could create an unfair advantage or disadvantage for some candidates.
The NBE’s argument that a similar system is used in exams like IIT-JEE, where scores are normalized across papers of varying difficulty, was not accepted by the court. It maintained that normalization should be a rare exception, not a standard practice.
The court directed the NBE to identify and arrange for more examination centers to ensure all candidates can take the exam simultaneously. If this results in the need to delay the exam beyond the scheduled date, the authorities would be required to obtain approval from the court for any rescheduling.
