The number of top rankers in NEET-UG will go down to 61 from 67 after the National Testing Agency's decision to withdraw grace marks awarded to 1,563 students, officials said on Thursday.

Six of these 1,563 candidates who appeared in the medical entrance exam from a centre in Haryana had shared the top rank with 61 others.

Amid a raging row over the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG), 2024, the Centre told the Supreme Court on Thursday that it has cancelled the grace marks awarded to 1,563 candidates who took the examination for admission to MBBS and other such courses.

They will have the option to either take a retest or forego the compensatory marks awarded to them for loss of time.

"Six out of these 1,563 candidates shared the first rank with 61 others. The number of top rankers will now go down from 67 to 61," a senior National Testing Agency (NTA) official said.

Unless these candidates take a retest and score 720 out of 720, they will not regain their top spot, the official added.

Asked about how the ranks of other candidates will be impacted, the official explained, "The scores of these 1,563 candidates will now be the pre-normalisation scores and not one with grace marks. A revised rank list will be issued only when we know how many of these candidates want to take a retest." Refusing to stall the counselling process for NEET-UG, 2024, scheduled to commence on July 6, the Supreme Court made it clear that the admission of successful candidates to medical colleges and other institutions will be subject to the outcome of the petitions that have sought relief such as cancellation of the examination held on May 5 on grounds of question paper leaks and other malpractices.

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