Shivangi Prakash-
Due to an inaccurate question in the December 2020 Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE), the Delhi High Court on Monday ordered that all applicants who answered the question wrongly be given an extra mark.
Justice Prateek Jalan issued the order in response to a petition filed by the Association Of MD Physicians, which claimed that one of the questions on the FMGE exam paper for December 2020 was incorrect.
The Court agreed with the petitioner’s argument and issued the following orders:
“All candidates must be awarded one mark in lieu of the disputed question.”
Candidates who chose option (c) for the disputed question, on the other hand, have already received the required mark and their grades do not need to be changed, according to the Court.
“To give them an additional grace mark would in fact reward them doubly for one incorrect question in the question paper. The candidates whose answer to the disputed question was marked incorrect, however, must be reassessed with one extra mark,” the Court made it clear.
FMGs are doctors who earned their main medical degrees outside of India, which are equal to MBBS.
Only if they pass the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination can they become eligible to practice medicine in India (FMGE).
The petitioner, an association of Indian citizens with medical degrees from overseas colleges, had moved the High Court, claiming that one of the questions on the FMGE for December 2020 had no right response among the several possibilities.
The petitioner claimed that the challenged question was technically erroneous because the SRS provides data on all four criteria.
The respondent, the National Board of Examinations, asserted that the FMGE questions undergo pre-examination and post-examination validation and that the challenged question has been assessed at various stages by eight community medicine experts.
The Court initially considered whether it had jurisdiction to hear the matter and interfere in the examinations.
On the merit of the case, the Court ruled that the petitioner was successful in demonstrating that the NBE made a clear error in setting the issue, which authorizes judicial intervention.
The respondent’s claim that the RGI is not an expert in community medicine was dismissed by the High Court.
“RGI is certainly an expert on the question of what is and what is not part of the SRS. It is indeed surprising that an academic body like the NBE should take such an extreme position. This attitude displays an unfortunate determination to persist in an error, rather than an open minded approach, which should inform all academic enterprise,” the Court said.
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