The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: An assistant professor in the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT-D) has raised questions over the report submitted by IIT-Madras to the Supreme Court at the behest of the National Testing Agency (NTA) about the recently-concluded NEET-UG examination that has been embroiled in controversy after allegations of paper leak.
While the IIT Madras report, cited by the NTA, says that there were no abnormalities in the way marks and ranks were distributed for the 23 lakh candidates, Vishal Vaibhav, Assistant Professor, Optics and Photonics Centre, IIT-D, has said that the test conducted by the IIT-D to give clean chit to the examination process did not qualify as a valid statistical test, reported The Hindu.
The analysis by Vaibhav has been done for the petitioners in the NEET 2024 case and is going to be submitted in the Supreme Court.
Earlier, on July 10, the government had submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court citing the IIT-Madras report and saying that “neither any indication of mass malpractice nor a localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores”, reported The Indian Express.
The IIT-Madras report had analysed data of number of students who appeared along with their score at a national level for two years and stated that it showed a bell curve. The report also stated that the distribution of marks is ‘quite normal.’
“The recipe proposed by the IIT-M team does not rise up to the level of a statistical test because it lacks in the requisite specificity to aid decision making,” Vaibhav’s report states, contradicting the findings of IIT-Madras.
Vaibhav added that if raw data for all the years of students and their scores is made public, an open-source analysis can be conducted, picking up any possible abnormality in rank inflation.
“It can further be used to investigate for any fishy patterns, including investigating centres where such candidates took tests, their pattern of answering questions and so on,” he added.
On July 8, a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) D Y Chandrachud had said that the decision on repeating the entire exam process would depend on whether the breach was systemic, or the beneficiaries of the fraud could be separated from the untainted examinees, reported The Indian Express.
The court had asked “whether it would be feasible using data analytics” to “identify suspect or suspicious cases”.
“On plotting this data on a linear curve for 2023 and 2024, there were no major abnormalities seen as submitted by IIT-M, but when we plot it on logarithmic scale, which is like using a magnifying glass to see the data comparison, large gaps are picked up at extreme ends of the curve. On the extreme right end, we find more students scoring higher scores in 2024 as compared to 2023. It is evident that a logarithmic plot is better suited to visualise rank inflation, the one that IIT-M has not used. The current method used by IIT-M lacks specificity to pick up anomalies and is pseudo-scientific,” added Vaibhav, reported The Hindu.