The Supreme Court on Thursday, 15 October 2026, issued notice on a plea challenging the manner in which the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) disclosed the answer key and candidate responses for NEET-PG 2026. The petition was filed by the Democratic Medical Association and a group of NEET-PG aspirants seeking full, candidate-wise transparency in the postgraduate medical entrance examination process.

The Bench and the Parties

A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe issued notice to the Union of India, the NBEMS, and the National Medical Commission (NMC). The court tagged the matter with pending petitions already before it concerning the NEET-PG examination. The matter is likely to be listed next on 26 October. Senior Advocate Sidharth Suri, assisted by Advocate Satyam Singh Rajput, appeared for the petitioners.

What the Plea Challenges

The petition targets the 1 October notice issued by NBEMS, titled 'Scorecard and Answer Key of NEET-PG 2026', under which candidates can access question-wise evaluation details only through their individual applicant login. NEET-PG 2026 was conducted on 30 August, and results were declared on 24 September. Following the result, several candidates sought access to the actual question paper, official answer key, and recorded responses to independently verify their scores.

The Core Transparency Concern

According to the petition, the existing disclosure mechanism provides only the Question ID, response status, a numerical correct-answer ID, the option selected by the candidate, and the marks awarded — but does not provide the actual text of questions or the complete text of options in the sequence in which they appeared during the examination.

'The candidate is consequently shown a coded numerical matrix, but is not able to correlate such identifiers with what he or she actually saw and answered during the examination,' the petition stated.

The petitioners further argued that NBEMS adopts candidate-specific shuffling of both the sequence of questions and the order of options. 'Thus, merely informing a candidate that, against a particular Question ID, Option 2 was correct and Option 3 was selected does not enable the candidate to ascertain what the underlying question was, what Options 2 and 3 actually contained, or whether the correct question and option sequence have been accurately mapped to that candidate's examination record,' the plea stated. This means candidates can reconcile marks arithmetically but cannot independently verify the substantive answer key or challenge ambiguous questions.

What the Petitioners Have Demanded

The plea has urged the apex court to direct NBEMS to make available a candidate-wise mapped question paper and response sheet containing the actual questions in the sequence presented during the examination, the complete options, recorded responses, correct answers, and marks awarded. It has also sought a downloadable and permanent electronic copy of each candidate's examination record, along with a reasonable, time-bound mechanism for raising question-wise objections.

The petitioners have proposed that such objections be examined by a duly constituted subject-expert committee, with consequential correction of scores and ranks wherever errors are established. The plea also seeks appropriate guidelines or standard operating procedures to govern post-examination transparency in future postgraduate medical entrance examinations.

Broader Context

This development comes amid sustained scrutiny of examination transparency in high-stakes national entrance tests. The Supreme Court has previously engaged with transparency and verifiability issues in NEET-PG, and tagging this petition with pending matters signals the court's intention to address systemic concerns in a consolidated manner. For hundreds of thousands of MBBS graduates whose postgraduate admissions hinge on NEET-PG ranks, the outcome of this case could set a lasting precedent for how examination bodies disclose and handle challenge mechanisms.