The presence of IIT Madras director on the National Testing Agency's (NTA) governing body as an ex-officio member does not amount to conflict of interest, the exam body has told the Supreme Court. This comes against the backdrop of the Centre citing a report by IIT Madras director, Professor V Kamakoti, to stress that there was no malpractice in the conduct of the all-India exam for admission to MBBS courses.
Narendra Hooda, the counsel for the petitioner in the NEET UG case, had said the data analytics report was not reliable and alleged a conflict of interest because the IIT Madras director was a member of the NTA governing body.
Refuting this, NTA has said in a supplementary chargesheet that the director of an IIT that conducts the JEE (Advanced) exam for engineering aspirants is an ex-officio member of the NTA governing body and this year, IIT Madras conducted the exam. However, the core work of NTA is handled by its managing committee. The governing body, it said, only looks at policy matters.
The IIT Madras director, the NTA said, had nominated another professor to attend the governing body's meetings. And this professor, too, had not attended any meeting since December last year. The IIT Madras director, it said, had not attended any meeting of NTA governing body since December 2022.
During a hearing into the case of alleged irregularities in NEET, which has sparked nationwide protests, the Centre told the Supreme Court that data analytics of results shows that the marks distribution follows the bell-shaped curve that is witnessed in any large-scale examination and there is no indication of an abnormality.
The Centre then said that according to the findings in the IIT Madras report, there is an overall increase in the marks students have got.
"This increase is seen across the cities and centres. This is attributed to 25 per cent reduction in syllabus. In addition, candidates obtaining such high marks are spread across multiple cities and multiple centres, indicating very less likelihood of malpractice," it said.
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