The Supreme Court has been requested to urgently list a plea challenging the National Board of Examinations' (NBE) decision to hold the NEET PG 2025 exam in two shifts.
On May 26, the petitioners' counsel brought up the matter before Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud and Justice AG Masih. The counsel highlighted the urgency of the matter, stating, “My lords had said they would list the matter this week, but it has not come in the list. The urgency is that the admit cards will be issued in the first week of June, June 2—kindly have it tomorrow or the day after.”
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The bench agreed to list the matter soon.
Earlier, on May 23, the issue was mentioned before the same bench led by CJI Gavai, where the court had agreed to hear the matter in the last week of May.
The NEET PG 2025 exam is scheduled for June 15, with results expected by July 15.
Notably, on May 5, the Court had asked for a response from the National Board of Examinations, National Medical Council, and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare regarding the petition.
Recently, the Supreme Court also delivered a judgment to curb seat-blocking in NEET PG counselling and directed the release of raw scores, answer keys, and normalization formulae used in the NEET PG exams.
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The petition argues that holding the NEET PG 2025 exam in two shifts could create unfairness due to differences in the difficulty levels of question papers in each shift. The petition seeks a direction to conduct the exam in a single shift to ensure “just, fair, reasonable, and equitable” competition for all candidates.
“Holding such an extensive examination in two shifts directly violates the rights of the candidates under Article 14, as maintaining just, fair, reasonable, and equitable grounds of competition is almost impossible because of the lack of transparency in the moderation and normalization process. It also violates Article 21 of the candidates, as the process violates the basic right to a fair examination,” the plea stated.
The petition also refers to NEET PG 2024, which was held in two shifts and faced challenges due to issues arising from the shift system. According to an assessment by a “prominent online coaching platform,” there were noticeable differences in the number of questions from each subject in the two shifts of NEET PG 2024.
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The plea highlights:
“As can be clearly seen from the above, the number of questions from several subjects vary, which is likely to grant an undue advantage to several candidates. It will create inflation and variation in marks and rankings, violating the right to equality under Article 14 of the candidates. It is humbly submitted that to weed out such discrepancies and provide a uniform/equitable testing ground and fair competition, a single shift is the only viable solution.”
The petition argues that one batch of candidates might face a harder paper while another batch might have an easier one, which was reportedly the case in NEET PG 2024.
Case Details: Dr. ADITI & ORS v. NATIONAL BOARD OF EXAMINATION IN MEDICAL SCIENCES & ORS| DIARY NO. - 22918/2025
