Calcutta HC awards 20 marks to a NEET candidate for wrongly translated questions

NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 28: The Calcutta High Court has awarded 20 marks to a student who appeared for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) 2018 in Bengali after receiving confirmation from Calcutta University that five questions were incorrectly translated in the said language.

The petitioner, Wasim Akram Hossain, filed a writ petition claiming that there are seven erroneous questions in the paper. The court accepted five mistranslated questions out of the identified seven questions. The candidate had attempted all these five questions and four of them were answered incorrectly. The court, on December 20, thus passed the ruling in favour of Hossain who was awarded 16 marks for four wrong answers and 4 marks for the negative marking incurred.   

While delivering the judgment, Justice Arindam Sinha pointed out “Denying him marks on contention he ought to have compared with the questions set in English would be unjust. Firstly, because an examinee, in the examination to find out the depth of knowledge, will not readily think the question is wrong. Second, the comparison would then present such an examinee with more difficulty.”

The court sought clarification for the erroneous translation of five questions in Bengali that led to wrong judgment and time management for the petitioner as compared to the candidates who attempted the questions in English. The court sought the clarification from Calcutta University for expertise in the matter and the Central Board of Secondary Education, previous exam conducting body of NEET.

The verdict becomes even more significant as the information brochure issued by the CBSE mentions that in case of confusion in any question, the English version will be accepted as the final version.

The Calcutta High Court had earlier, in an interim order, held a seat vacant for the petitioner should he qualify the exam with the marks after the case verdict is reached.

However, the petitioner has argued that the question paper included 98 other questions that were wrongly translated, putting the Bengali medium aspirant at a disadvantage. Reports suggest that Hossain intends to challenge the current verdict before the division bench. The lawyer of the petitioner has stated that Hossain still needs three more marks to reach the cutoff score of 420 to secure his seat at the government college.

Every year scores of candidates give the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test to get into premium medical colleges of the country. The verdict comes as a positive message to the candidates who give the test in regional languages. Language-wise, as many as 27,437 candidates attempted NEET question paper in the Bengali language in the year 2018.