In the recently announced results of NEET UG 2024, 67 studentshave achieved an All India Rank (AIR) 1. While students and experts are worried about the effect this will have on cut-off and admission, NTA explained that this has happened due to a change in NCERT books. The conflict happened when NTA observed — after provisional answer key objections — that two of the options given were marked correct by NCERT in their old and new books.
As per the old NCERT book, the correct option was ‘Atoms of each element are stable’. However, the new NCERT books states that ‘atoms of most of the elements are stable’.Keeping this in mind, “NTA had to assign 5 marks to all students who had marked either of the options. Due to this, marks of a total of 44 students’ increased from 715 to 720, which resulted in an increased number of toppers,” a senior NTA official told indianexpress.com. When asked if this was the sole reason behind a record number of NEET UG toppers this year, NTA clarified that while this played a major role, the “fact that the paper was comparatively easier this year and there was a huge increase in the number of registrations also played important roles in the increased number of toppers”. This year, a record 23.81 lakh students registered for NEET UG, an increase from last year’s 20.87 lakh registrations. As per the data shared by NTA, a total of 9,96,393 male candidates and 13,31,321 female candidates, and 17 transgender candidates appeared for the exam.
While the overall attendance has been recorded at 96.94 per cent, the attendance of male candidates was 96.92 per cent, 96.96 per cent for female candidates, and 94.44 per cent for transgender candidates However, NTA has also refuted students’ claims that this can have an adverse effect on opportunities for the general category students. “General students still have as many seats as they had earlier, and so do all other categories. The exam was also comparatively easier, so nobody will suffer,” the NTA official added.
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