'Can't jeopardize careers...': SC refuses to postpone NEET-PG exam
The Supreme Court has dismissed a plea seeking the postponement of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for Postgraduate (NEET-PG) exam scheduled for Sunday (August 11). The plea was filed by a group of students citing inconvenience due to the allocated exam cities. The court, however, said that it could not jeopardize the careers of nearly 2 lakh candidates due to the concerns of a few.
'We are not academic experts,' says SC
The bench, comprising Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices Manoj Misra and JB Pardiwala, said that it could not order the postponement of the exam just two days before it was supposed to be held. "How can we postpone such an exam? Nowadays people just come asking to postpone the exam. It's not a perfect world. We are not academic experts," the court said.
Petitioners raise concerns
The petitioners contended that information about the exam center was given only on Thursday when the test was scheduled for Sunday. They also raised concerns about the exam being conducted in two batches, citing fears of unfairness if one batch received a more difficult set of questions than the other. They requested that the normalization formula, which is intended to ensure fairness across different question sets, be disclosed in advance.
'Lack of transparency...': What petitioners said
Senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, representing the petitioners, argued that rescheduling the NEET-PG is necessary due to one exam being scheduled in the morning and another in the afternoon. Advocate on Record (AOR) Anas Tanwir also argued that the lack of transparency and challenges posed by distant test centers could disadvantage many students.
NEET-PG exam was already postponed once
The NEET-PG exam, initially scheduled for June 23, had already been postponed once as a precaution amid the row over irregularities in NEET-UG. The decision to postpone was taken by the Centre, which stated that it wanted to "undertake a thorough assessment of the robustness of processes of NEET-PG." This decision had inconvenienced many candidates at the time as they had to travel to different cities to appear for the exam.
