Bhubaneswar: Students who appeared for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) Thursday filed a petition in the Orissa High Court alleging injustice and step-motherly treatment by the National Testing Agency (NTA) which conducted the exam.
The students made NTA, the state government and the Chief Secretary of Odisha as parties to the case. NEET which was scheduled to be held May 5 was postponed to May 20 for Odisha due to cyclone Fani that hit the state May 3.
The students said NTA did not follow normalisation procedure in the state causing huge damage to applicants from Odisha as they got extremely poor rankings. The state will face severe shortage of doctors as 15 per cent seats reserved for Odisha students in state medical colleges would be filled up by students from outside the state.
The NEET is conducted in different shifts with different question papers which greatly differ in difficulty levels. So a normalisation procedure is adopted to equalise the scores of all students.
The NTA authorities, through email, said, “The number of Odisha candidates is small (approximately 35,000) compared to the total number of candidates (approximately 13.75 lakh). So the method you have proposed for percentile calculation cannot be accepted.”
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