The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has appealed to the Supreme Court contesting the Madras High Court’s decision to grant grace marks to NEET students who took the exam in Tamil. Following the decision, several institutions put their NEET counselling and admission processes on hold, as the decision could lead to a change in the subsequent merit lists.

The CBSE, which is representing the government, feels that implementing the Madras HC’s decision would open the Board to more litigation from other states. Moreover, the CBSE feels that giving 196 grace marks to 24,000 students who took the exam in Tamil would change the merit list and students whose names are featured in the current list will get pushed out.

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As reported earlier, the CBSE was mulling over approaching the Supreme Court for 2018 NEET admissions. A source in CBSE has apparently confirmed to the Indian Express that the board might approach the Supreme Court to contest the decision. The report quotes an unnamed source in the HRD Ministry as saying, “The NEET bulletin clearly states that candidates opting for regional languages will be given a bi-lingual question paper and, in case of any ambiguity in translation, the English version will be treated as final.”

The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court, in its decision on July 10th, directed the CBSE to grant four grace marks each for 49 questions – 196 marks in total – to students who had attempted the exam in Tamil. The High Court was responding to a petition that claimed there was a mistranslation in the Tamil question paper.

The court had asked the board to issue a new merit list within 2 weeks and that all admissions based on the previous list be kept at abeyance.

The court in its decision had said, “The difficulty of a student in taking an examination of such importance, in understanding rightly a wrong question, be howsoever mild the error, is to be appreciated, placing ourselves in his shoes and not in the shoes of those having the leisure of easy chair reflection.”