The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered that the NEET PG 2025 exam, scheduled for June 15, be conducted in a single shift instead of two. A bench led by Justice Vikram Nath directed the concerned authorities to hold the exam in one shift and maintain full transparency throughout the process, according to a media report.
The bench also comprised Justices Sanjay Kumar and N V Anjaria, who said that holding the NEET PG 2025 in two shifts creates “arbitrariness”. “Any two question papers can never be said to be having an identical level of difficulty or ease,” the top court said. The bench passed the order while hearing a plea challenging a notification on holding the NEET-PG 2025 examination in two shifts.
NEET PG in 2 Shifts: What Prompted the Supreme Court’s Decision?
In March, the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) announced that NEET PG 2025 would be conducted in two shifts, continuing the format used in the previous year. However, this decision triggered concerns among aspirants, who feared that holding the exam in multiple shifts could lead to discrepancies in the difficulty levels of question papers, potentially impacting fairness and individual performance. Many candidates who appeared for NEET PG 2024 had already raised questions about the transparency of the results and the credibility of the normalisation process used to equalise scores across shifts. These concerns ultimately led to legal intervention and the Supreme Court’s order to conduct the exam in a single shift.
The petitioners in the NEET PG case demanded that the National Board of Examinations (NBE) release the answer key, response sheets, raw scores, pre-normalised scores, and the final normalised results for all exam shifts. They argued that making the release of answer keys and question papers a standard practice would help ensure greater transparency in the examination process. Additionally, they urged the Supreme Court to halt the counselling process until these concerns were thoroughly addressed.
The controversy stems from last year, when NEET PG was conducted in two shifts for the first time—on August 11—with sessions held from 9 am to 12:30 pm and from 3:30 pm to 7 pm. To maintain fairness, candidates were randomly allotted shifts and the NBE adopted a normalization process to account for any variation in question paper difficulty.
Results were calculated using raw scores and percentiles accurate up to seven decimal places. In the case of a tie, preference was given to older candidates. The final merit list was based on percentile scores across all shifts. However, many aspirants felt that this system lacked transparency and raised concerns about fairness, leading to legal challenges and eventually the Supreme Court’s direction to hold NEET PG 2025 in a single shift.
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