New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the manual evaluation of the answer script of a NEET-UG 2025 aspirant who alleged an error in the page sequencing of his question paper.

A bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and K V Viswanathan ordered that the result of the evaluation be placed on record.

“He (the petitioner) will have the satisfaction of getting his papers manually checked,” the bench said.

The aspirant claimed that the sequencing of pages in the NEET-UG question paper was incorrect.

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH, and related courses in government and private institutions across India.

Additional Solicitor General Archana Pathak Dave, appearing for the respondents, submitted a copy of the question paper to explain that the mistake had occurred due to incorrect stapling.

“However, in order to satisfy ourselves, we direct that the petitioner's paper shall be evaluated manually and the result of the evaluation be placed on record. The said exercise shall be carried out within a period of one week,” the bench said.

Dave explained that stapling was a manual task. The bench responded, “The least that could be done is to give the questions in seriatim. Look at the panic of the candidate. It is not an ordinary exam.”

Dave added that only semi-skilled or semi-literate persons were employed for stapling the question papers. “If we give it to a literate person and if he staples it, we know for sure that one or two questions he can memorise and they can go out,” she said, calling the incident a “rarest of rare” case.

The bench, however, pointed out the gravity of the issue, remarking, “17-18 year old students are dying by suicide. Please don't try to justify.”

The matter has been posted for further hearing on August 12.