New Delhi, November 22: The Supreme Court on Thursday quashed the Madras High Court directive to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to grant 196 grace marks to students who opted the Tamil language for appearing for this year's NEET exam. The apex court had stayed the Madras High Court order on July 20.

"Because of a mistake in translation which could have been detected and avoided by the students, we find it unjust that all the students across the board who took the examination in Tamil have been awarded four marks for all the 49 questions without any reference to the answer of those questions,"a bench comprising of Justice SA Bobde and Justice L Nageswara Rao said.

The apex court's order took a reference to a clause in NEET-UG, 2018, regulations, which says, “In case of any ambiguity in translation of any of the questions, its English version shall be treated as final.” On July 10, the Madras High Court had ordered the CBSE to grant 196 marks — 4 marks each for 49 erroneously translated questions in the Tamil version of this year’s NEET — to the students who took the exam in the regional language.

There were 180 questions with a total mark of 720 in the NEET. The CBSE conducted the NEET on May 6 in 136 cities in 11 languages, the results of which were announced on June 4. The petitioner, senior CPI(M) leader and Rajya Sabha MP T K Rangarajan, had sought full marks for the 49 questions, saying keywords in Tamil questions were wrongly translated from English and this caused confusion among the students.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Nov 22, 2018 07:59 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).