Senior Advocate Narendra Hooda, who represents the lead petitioner, raised questions over the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras report. This happened during the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test - Undergraduate (NEET UG) hearing which the Supreme Court resumed today, Wednesday, July 18.
According to Livelaw, referring to the bell curve graph by IIT Madras, he said, “Inflation of marks is admitted, leak is admitted. The curve is no indication that there is no abnormality. Because, the data is too large, which cannot be caught. Granular variations can't be seen with this large data of 23 lakh candidates.”
“I am starting with a handicap. I do not have the results. Because of that I cannot have data analytics. One of the directors of IIT Madras is a member of the Governing Body of the NTA. They have run the data analytics taking the entire number,” he continued.
Hooda said the IIT Madras analytics based on 23 lakh students' performance is not reliable and that the analytics should have been done based on one lakh eight thousand candidates who would get admissions, reported LiveLaw.
“If data analytics is to be run for 23 lakhs, at what stage, if 10,000 or 20,000 people have sneaked into it, you cannot detect any abnormality. The correct procedure was to apply this process to one lakh eight thousand people,” Hooda added.
Hooda argues that the IIT Madras report can not be relied on and that there was a conflict of interest since the IIT Madras Director, Prof V Kamakoti, is a member of the governing body of NTA, states Livelaw.
In response to that, the Solicitor General clarified that the IIT Madras Director who prepared the report is not a member of the NTA. "That is factually wrong. Somebody else was. Subject to further verification, whichever IIT is organising the JEE, that Chairman of that IIT is ex-officio member of NTA. But the director who prepared this report is not a member,” reported LiveLaw.
IIT Madras was assigned the task of suggesting modalities which could be followed to segregate students suspected of using unfair means from other students.
It said six of the 67 who scored 720 marks were given grace marks due to loss of time at the Jhajjar Centre. Out of 61 candidates, only 17 candidates obtained 720/720 marks based on provisional answer keys and 44 on account of the revision in one answer key of Physics, a report by The Hindu states.
