New Delhi, Jun 20 (IANS): The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice on a plea filed by a batch of tribal students from Meghalaya seeking directions to the National Testing Agency (NTA) to permit them to appear in NEET-UG retest since they had also suffered loss of time in taking the examination held on May 5.

It added that due to lack of clarity as to which question paper was to be answered and as a result of such confusion and contradictory instructions, the petitioners were denied almost 40-45 minutes on average of the allocated time period for attempting the question papers.

Further, the plea said that the NTA has "arbitrarily" chosen 1,563 candidates for the award of grace marks in order to downplay the entire situation and there is no basis to come to the conclusion that students at other centres were not affected by the discrepancies committed in the conduct of the NEET-UG examination.

The writ petition alleged that petitioners were arbitrarily denied the opportunity to appear in the fresh examination even though they are similarly placed as 15,63 students as the petitioners were deprived of their allocated time to attempt the examination and seek an opportunity to appear in the June 23 retest or fresh examination on any other suitable date.