NEET-UG 2024 grace marks: 44 perfect scores, 1,563 scorecards cancelled, and a re-test

Forty-four candidates finished NEET-UG 2024 with a full score, 720 out of 720.¹

They did not get there by answering every question correctly. Grace marks were awarded, and it was that award of marks that carried them to the ceiling. A grace mark is a mark the examining body gives a candidate, not a mark the candidate wrote an answer for.

About 23,33,297 candidates sat that examination.² Out of all of them, forty-four ended on a perfect paper once the awarded marks were counted.

The harder part to picture is what happened inside the group those marks landed on. They did not go to everyone. They went to a defined set of affected candidates, and once applied, the scores within that same set ran from minus 20 to 720.³

One intervention. One group. The top of the scale and a negative number inside it.

What a mark is worth in this exam

The paper had 180 questions, each carrying four marks.² That is the whole design, and it closes at 720. There is nothing above it, so 720 is a ceiling rather than a target that can be overshot.

The scale also runs backwards. One negative mark is assigned for an incorrect answer.² A correct answer moves a candidate up by four, a wrong one moves them down by one.

Qualifying is decided by percentile, which is a candidate's position relative to everyone who wrote the same paper rather than a percentage of marks. For NEET-UG 2024 the 50th percentile was the qualifying cut-off,² and it worked out to 164 marks out of 720.²

Hold those two numbers next to each other. Qualifying begins at 164. The ceiling is 720.

Qualifying is not admission. Candidates were competing for 1.08 lakh undergraduate medical seats.² Roughly 56,000 of those sit in government institutions² and the balance of 52,000 in privately managed ones.²

So the shape of the thing is visible: a fixed ceiling of 720, a penalty of one mark for a wrong answer, a qualifying line at 164, and 1.08 lakh seats at the end of it. On a scale built that way, single marks separate candidates from one another. A four-mark swing on one question is not a rounding error.

The size of the machine

NEET-UG 2024 was conducted by the National Testing Agency on 5 May 2024.² That single day of testing ran across 4,750 examination centres inside 571 cities,² and in fourteen more cities overseas.²

The exam is the gateway to undergraduate medical, dental and AYUSH admissions, in government and private institutions, across the country.⁴ Gateway is the word to sit with. For a government college seat it is the exam. For a private college seat it is the same exam. Dental, the same. AYUSH, the same.

The results were declared on 4 June 2024.² Between those two dates every answer sheet had to travel from its centre into one common result list, and a system of that size works only if all 4,750 buildings ran identically on the same morning.

Marks for minutes

Here is the mechanism behind the forty-four.

Compensatory marks, also called grace marks, were awarded to 1,563 candidates at certain centres who did not get the full duration of the examination.³

Take that apart, because everything rests on it. What those candidates lost was time. What they were given instead was marks. That is the whole idea, and it is also the thing candidates went on to question, because time lost and marks gained are not the same currency and somebody has to set the exchange rate.

Following the grant of those marks, the affected candidates' scores ranged from minus 20 to 720.³ The same correction, applied to the same group, produced results at both ends of the scale. And at the top of it, the award of grace marks led to forty-four students reaching a full 720.¹

For a candidate outside that group this was not an administrative footnote, and the reaction came quickly. NEET-UG candidates complained about irregularities in the way students were awarded compensatory marks for lost time.⁴ Separately, aspirants alleged a paper leak, the awarding of compensatory marks, and anomalies in the question paper.⁵

Those are complaints and allegations, and they are worth keeping apart from what is not in dispute. The 1,563 candidates is not an allegation. The range from minus 20 to 720 is not an allegation. The forty-four perfect scores are not an allegation. Those numbers came out of the system itself.

The agency's own account

Put the other side at full strength, because it is a complete explanation and it needs nobody to have cheated.

NTA submitted that the high number of perfect scores came from a reduction in the syllabus of approximately 22 to 25 per cent compared with the previous year.³

Submitted is a careful word. It means this was offered as a formal explanation to a court, not a remark to a reporter. A syllabus reduction means the list of chapters a candidate has to prepare gets shorter. The implied reasoning, which is a reading rather than something the agency spelled out, is that a smaller syllabus is more completely masterable, so the ceiling becomes a score more candidates can touch.

Alongside it sits the agency's second position: it denied any wrongdoing in relation to the paper leak allegations.⁴

Taken together the account is self-contained. An unusual result with an ordinary cause, and nothing improper underneath it. That explanation is disputed, which means contested rather than settled, and disputed is not the same as false. It only means the explanation had to survive somewhere outside the agency's own office.

The forum that tested it

Several petitions were filed in the Supreme Court seeking a direction to recall the NEET-UG 2024 results and to conduct the examination afresh.⁵ Recall means results already declared would be pulled back. Afresh means the whole test held again, for everyone. The petitions alleged paper leak and malpractice in the test held on 5 May.⁵

Hold on to the word alleged. At that stage nobody had been found guilty of anything and no court had said a leak happened. What matters is what the court did once the claim was in front of it.

The Supreme Court issued a notice to the National Testing Agency in response to the pleas seeking a fresh examination.⁴ A notice is not a verdict. It is the court formally telling the other side that a petition exists, that they are now a party to it, and that they must come and answer. The matter went to a vacation bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Ahsanuddin Amanullah,⁴ the bench that sits when the regular court is closed and hears what cannot wait.

Then came the line that travelled everywhere.

The sanctity has been affected, so we need answers

Read the wording carefully. Sanctity affected. Answers needed. That is not a finding that a leak occurred. It is a statement that trust in the process had taken damage and the agency now had to explain itself. Strong language from a court, and strong enough that many people who heard it assumed something had been stopped.

Nothing had. A notice asks a question; by itself it cancels no result and halts nothing.

What was not stopped

The Court declined to postpone the counselling process.⁴ Counselling is the stage after the examination where candidates, in rank order, are allotted their seats and their colleges. Once it runs, seats fill.

So the question was straightforward. If a serious question hangs over an examination, should the seat allotment built on it pause while that question is answered. On the record the Court said no, and reiterated that it would not stay the counselling.⁵ A stay is an order that freezes a process, and the Court said it was not freezing this one.

Its reasoning was given plainly.

Counselling will go on and we will not stop it. If the exam goes, then everything goes in totality, so nothing to fear

That sentence has two halves. The first says the process continues. The second says that if the examination itself falls, everything built on it falls with it. The Court was not treating counselling as a settlement, but as something that would fall away if its foundation did.

It then set the hearing on the petitions for 8 July.⁵

Nothing in any of that is a finding. It is the state of the proceedings on those dates: counselling not stayed, and a hearing still ahead.

The reversal

What the agency brought back to the Court was not a defence of the grace marks.

NTA told a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta that a committee had been constituted to review the results of the candidates who were awarded grace marks to compensate for loss of time.⁶ The same submission was placed before the Court in the fuller form: a committee to review the results of over 1,563 candidates awarded those marks.⁵

Then the committee reported. It decided to cancel the score-cards of the 1,563 candidates who had been given grace marks, and to offer those candidates the option of a re-test.⁵ A score-card is the result document a candidate carries into admissions, so cancelling it removes the very number a seat is decided on. The compensatory marks awarded to all 1,563 stood withdrawn, and a re-test of all of them was to be held on 23 June.⁶

The agency stated that the re-test would be conducted on 23 June and the result declared before 30 June.⁵ The Court took that statement on record, including that the retest would be notified that day, so that counselling, due to begin in July, would not be affected.⁶ That last clause is the entire logic of the timetable: once counselling begins, a pending result is a stranded candidate. The agency added that it would contact all 1,563 candidates by email about the re-examination.⁶

The test was held. A special test was conducted for 1,563 students in supersession of the compensatory marks earlier awarded.² In supersession means the new score replaces the old one completely; the compensatory marks do not survive beside it.

The last time the calendar moved this fast

All of that came down to time lost inside a hall and a calendar squeezed to make up for it. There is an earlier instance of this agency rewriting a calendar at speed, and it is worth the comparison because the pressure was entirely different.

NEET-UG 2020 was originally scheduled for 3 May 2020 and had to be postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic,⁷ notified in a public notice dated 27 March 2020.⁷ Between that notice and the original examination date sat about a month.⁷

The replacement date arrived in a second public notice, dated 22 May 2020 and signed by the Director General.⁷ That is nineteen days after the date the examination was originally meant to be held had already passed.⁷ The notice fixed the rescheduled test for 26 July 2020, from 2.00 pm to 5.00 pm.⁷ From that notice to the examination was a further two months,⁷ and from the first postponement notice to the examination actually held, three months.⁷

One line in that second notice matters more than it looks. The dates for downloading admit cards, the document carrying a candidate's roll number and centre of examination, were to be displayed fifteen days before the conduct of the examination.⁷ The calendar could move by months, and a candidate learned where they were sitting fifteen days out.

A different exam, and an allegation that reaches the centre

The next case on the record is a different examination under a different investigation, and it turns on what is alleged to have happened at one centre.

On 1 September 2021 the CBI registered a case against a private company and others, including its directors, three employees, and private persons described as conduits, on allegations of irregularities being committed in the then ongoing JEE (Main) 2021 examinations.⁸

Registering a case means an agency has formally written down an allegation and begun investigating. It is not a finding, and nobody stands held guilty at that point. Everything that follows in this section is what the record states was alleged.

The case records an allegation that the irregularities were being committed by a private educational institution, its directors, their touts and associates, and staff posted at the examination centre, along with other unknown persons.⁸ That list does not stop at outsiders. As recorded, it reaches staff posted at the centre itself.

The core of the allegation concerns the examination software. It was alleged that the company and its directors were manipulating the online examination of JEE (Main) and facilitating aspiring students to get admission in top NITs, in consideration of a huge amount.⁸ The method described is remote access: it was alleged that a candidate's question paper was solved remotely, from a chosen examination centre in Sonepat, Haryana.⁸ Remote access is what it sounds like. One computer operated from another somewhere else. The screen sits in front of the candidate; the person working the paper is not in the room.

Note the word chosen. The allegation on record names a particular centre.

Then the money. It was alleged that once admission was done, a heavy amount ranging from approximately 12 to 15 lakh per candidate was collected.⁸ And it was alleged that security was held in advance: class ten and class twelve mark sheets, user IDs, passwords, and post-dated cheques of aspiring students.⁸ A post-dated cheque is signed today but carries a future date, so it cannot be banked until then. Held as security it does one job. It makes walking away expensive.

What the searches produced

When investigators went to the addresses, the CBI conducted searches at nineteen places, including Delhi and the National Capital Region, Pune, Jamshedpur, Indore and Bangalore.⁸ That is not one office in one city. It stretches across the north, the west, the east and the south.

The searches led to the recovery of twenty-five laptops⁸ and seven PCs.⁸ They also led to the recovery of around thirty post-dated cheques.⁸ Several persons were being questioned as part of the searches.⁸

Machines are what you would expect; any operation touching computers leaves computers behind. Paper that can be cashed later is a different kind of object. What those recovered cheques mean has not been tested by any court, and no finding about them has been stated. What exists is a seizure list, and a seizure list is a beginning rather than a conclusion. Recovering a laptop is not the same as establishing what is on it, and questioning a person is not the same as saying anything about that person.

Where both cycles stand

The CBI has stated that the investigation into the JEE (Main) 2021 irregularities case is continuing.⁸ That word is a status, not a verdict. From 1 September 2021 to now, five years have elapsed with no end recorded in these documents.⁸

So the honest shape of this piece is two examination cycles and two sets of allegations, both still inside proceedings. One was listed before a court on 8 July. The other sits inside an investigation the investigating agency itself describes as unfinished. Neither is decided here, because the documents do not say they are.

What the record does hand over is smaller and more useful than a verdict. A perfect score can be assembled out of marks that were never earned on the paper, and those same marks can be withdrawn again. The scale that produced forty-four candidates at 720 also produced minus 20 inside the same group, from the same correction, on the same day.

Which leaves the question this series keeps returning to. When a result list produces a number that looks impossible, who checks it before it becomes a rank?

MangoPOV. "NEET-UG 2024 grace marks: 44 perfect scores, 1,563 scorecards cancelled, and a re-test." 8 September 2026. https://mangopov.in/stories/neet-ug-2024-grace-marks/

@misc{mangopov-neet-ug-2024-grace-marks,
  title        = {NEET-UG 2024 grace marks: 44 perfect scores, 1,563 scorecards cancelled, and a re-test},
  author       = {{MangoPOV}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://mangopov.in/stories/neet-ug-2024-grace-marks/}},
}