NEET 2018 – HC Ordered Grace Marks for Tamil Students, asked CBSE to Prepare New Merit List

Madras HC has ordered CBSE to award 196 grace marks for Tamil NEET 2018 and prepare a fresh merit list within two weeks.

11 July 2018: The Madras High Court Bench has ordered to award “196 grace marks” to more than 24,000 students who appeared for the NEET 2018 exam in the Tamil language for admission to MBBS courses. The court has put a stay on the ongoing MBBSW admissions and has provided two weeks to CBSE to prepare the fresh merit list of candidates. The decision came because of wrong translation of 49 questions in Tamil language question paper of the national level medical entrance exam. Each question carries 4 marks.

A division bench of Justice C T Selvam and Justice A M Basheer Ahmed said, “The list of qualified candidates shall be kept in abeyance, as would the counselling, pending publishing details of the qualified candidates afresh.”

The order has received mixed reactions from students and parents. While more than 24,000 students who will now automatically qualify the NEET exam even if they have scored zero or -100 marks initially are excited about the order, others who have already bagged government medical seats are worried. Those candidates who are waiting for the second round of AIQ and state quota counselling, fear about their chance of getting a medical or dental college.

S Maheswari, whose son has got a government medical seat, said, “My son spent a year after Class 12 studying hard to get a high score. It would be unfair to snatch the seat that was given to him.”

On the other hand, another parent E Manikantan, said, “There is some justice finally. Our son wrote the exam in Tamil and had scored 182. But he was unable to get an MBBS seat as the cut-off for the BC category in all colleges in state counselling was 344. Now, with 378 marks, he will get a seat in a government college.”

The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court has passed the orders answering a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) filed by CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist) MP, TK Rangarajan, who claimed that there were translation errors in the Tamil NEET question paper and asked for grace marks for all the affected students. Mr Rangarajan said words such as “Cheetah” and “multiple allele” were wrongly translated as “Seetha” and “Ureter” respectively which caused a lot of confusion.