United Doctors Front Moves Supreme Court Against NEET PG 2025 Two-Shift Exam Pattern

New Delhi- In a significant legal challenge, the United Doctors Front (UDF) has filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court contesting the National Board of Examinations' (NBE) decision to conduct NEET PG 2025 in two separate shifts. The petition, registered under Diary Number 237822025, argues that the proposed examination format violates constitutional guarantees of equality and fair opportunity.

Filed through Advocate Satyam Singh Rajput, the petition highlights multiple concerns regarding the examination's fairness and transparency. The central contention revolves around the inherent inequality created by administering different question papers across shifts, which the UDF claims inevitably leads to varying difficulty levels. "This arbitrary allocation of shifts creates an uneven playing field where a candidate's performance gets evaluated against different standards based purely on chance," the petition states.

Dr. Lakshya Mittal, President of UDF, emphasized through counsel that the normalization process adopted by NBE - borrowed from AIIMS New Delhi - remains fundamentally flawed for a content-intensive examination like NEET PG. The petition points out that the statistical normalization assumes identical difficulty levels and candidate abilities across shifts, a presumption it terms "mathematically unsound and practically unverifiable."

The legal challenge gains significance against the backdrop of NEET PG 2024, which witnessed widespread discontent among aspirants regarding result discrepancies in the two-shift format. The petition notes that these concerns remain unaddressed, casting doubt on the examination authority's ability to ensure fairness through normalization.

A striking revelation in the petition is the complete lack of transparency in the evaluation process. Candidates reportedly have no access to raw scores, shift-wise difficulty indexes, or any mechanism to verify the fairness of normalization. This opacity, coupled with the absence of public consultation or expert scrutiny of the normalization methodology, forms a key pillar of the legal challenge.

Supporting their contention with public sentiment, the UDF cites a social media poll conducted on platform X (formerly Twitter) where 96% of participating NEET PG aspirants favored a single-shift examination. Advocate Satyam Singh Rajput, stated, "The conduct of NEET PG in two shifts with different question papers leads to inevitable variation in difficulty levels, thereby subjecting candidates to unequal standards of evaluation. This violates Article 14 and Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantee equality before law and the right to fair opportunity."

The petition seeks urgent judicial intervention, requesting the Court to direct conduct of NEET PG 2025 in a single uniform session and to stay the currently scheduled June 15 examination pending final disposal of the matter. With thousands of medical aspirants awaiting clarity, the Supreme Court's decision on this matter could have far-reaching implications for the conduct of national-level medical entrance examinations.