The Supreme Court on Monday asked the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) to file written submissions explaining why disclosing the actual NEET-PG questions after the examination would compromise the integrity of the postgraduate medical entrance test, LiveLaw and India Legal reported.
Source: LiveLaw
A Bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe was hearing petitions seeking greater transparency in NEET-PG, including a plea that candidates be given the actual questions and options they were shown in the examination, their recorded responses, the correct answers and the marks awarded. Among the reliefs sought is also a direction that NBEMS upload individual OMR answer sheets to each candidate's login account, along with the question paper and the answer key, immediately after the examination.
Senior Advocate Shikhil Suri, appearing for the petitioners, submitted that NBEMS has disclosed the master question set and its answers, but for the other shuffled sets it has disclosed only the question IDs — leaving candidates unable to verify their own evaluation against the questions they actually attempted.
'Question bank is a national asset': NBEMS
Counsel for NBEMS told the court that every candidate receives a different, shuffled question paper, and that the portal already gives each candidate the question IDs, the status of their answers and the correct answer — the only thing not disclosed is the text of the questions themselves. The question bank for NEET-PG is very limited and sits at the apex of the examination pyramid, counsel argued, calling it a national asset built by experts drawn from across the country. If the questions themselves start being disclosed year after year, counsel submitted, the entire bank would be quoted and exhausted within five to six years.
Source: India Legal
The Bench then directed NBEMS to put that justification on record in writing, asking it to explain why disclosure of the questions may compromise the integrity of the NEET-PG examination. The court has not ordered disclosure at this stage — it has only sought the examination body's reasoned submission.
How the dispute reached the court
The challenge arises from an NBEMS notice under which candidates were given question-wise evaluation details through their individual logins using numerical question and option IDs linked to a master question paper, instead of the actual questions and options presented to them. On October 15, the Supreme Court had issued notice on a plea by the Democratic Medical Association and NEET-PG aspirants challenging that mechanism, and tagged it with related pending petitions. NEET-PG 2026 was held on August 30 and its results were declared on September 24.
The petitioners argue that, because NBEMS shuffles both the sequence of questions and the order of options for each candidate, ID-only disclosure makes independent verification of scores practically impossible. NBEMS, for its part, maintains that unrestricted publication of question papers could gradually exhaust its limited question bank and weaken the test's ability to assess candidates' medical knowledge and clinical understanding. The matter will proceed after NBEMS files its written submissions.