The Allahabad High Court has directed the National Testing Agency (NTA) to reevaluate the Optical Marks Recognition (OMR) answer sheet of a National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test [NEET (UG)] 2025 candidate who mistakenly entered the wrong question booklet code.
The error resulted in her being awarded only 41 marks, instead of an estimated 589 marks, which would have otherwise placed her within the selection threshold.
A Division Bench of Justice Arindam Sinha and Justice Yogendra Kumar Srivastava held, “Petitioner has not alleged that she made mistake in answering any or several questions. Her contention is mistaken mention of the booklet code series. Her mistake has caused omission to evaluate her merit. We see the mistake in that context. Furthermore, the candidate is all of 20 years old and had prepared herself, as other candidates did, to take the examination. To err is human and it happens, in spite of there being notices against commission of errors. The Civil Procedure Code, 1908 does provide for correction of, inter alia, clerical errors made by the Court.”
Background
The petitioner admitted to inadvertently writing “46” instead of “47” as the booklet code on her OMR sheet. As a result, her answers were evaluated against an incorrect set of questions, drastically reducing her score.
Reasoning
The Court acknowledged the purpose behind shuffling question sequences in different booklets to prevent malpractice but emphasized the disproportionate consequence in this case, “The difference between 41 and 589 is vast. We appreciate that the object of the examination is to select the most meritorious. In this case, there has not been assessment of petitioner’s merit because of this error she committed.”
The Court added, “Hence, in event there is assessment of her merit and thereby she displaces somebody, who has less merit, that will require consideration.”
The Court thus directed the NTA to reassess the petitioner’s OMR sheet against the correct question booklet (code 47) and report the outcome to the Court.
Cause Title: Akshita Singh vs. Union of India & 3 Ors.
