In Brief
The Supreme Court set aside a High Court order granting 196 grace marks (4 marks each for 49 mistranslated questions) to all 24,000 students who took the NEET-UG 2018 medical entrance exam in Tamil. The Court held this uniform remedy was arbitrary and unjust because it awarded marks without reference to actual answers and despite an instruction designating English as the final version for resolving ambiguities. The order unfairly advantaged Tamil-medium students over those who sat in English and other languages. The Court stressed that grace marks should only be granted after expert evaluation of whether translation errors genuinely prevented correct answers.
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