New Delhi: In a veritable U-turn from its earlier stand that nothing was off with the NEET undergraduate exam this year, the Union government has told the Supreme Court that it will cancel the controversial grace marks awarded to 1,563 students.The National Testing Agency or NTA, which conducted these exams, had on June 8 announced that it would form a high-powered committee to look into the grace marks given to students who wrote the exams in six centres — an issue that has led candidates to question the integrity of the examination process as there was no mention of these compensatory marks in the prospectus issued before the examination.In that presser, too, NTA director general Subodh Kumar had claimed that there was nothing wrong with the examination process.Today, June 13, the government has told the court that the students who got the grace marks will be notified of their scores without them and given the option to appear for a re-test. Those who do not wish to sit for re-tests will have their original scores – without the grace marks – considered.LiveLaw reported advocate Kanu Agarwal, representing the Union government, as having told a vacation bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta, that the decision was taken by the panel constituted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) on June 12 to “allay the fears of the students”.Agarwal said that the grace marks had been given on the grounds of loss of time but resulted in a “skewed situation” because they could only be limited to unattempted questions.Careers 360 founder and expert Maheshwar Peri had noted on X that the question of awarding grace marks was fraught from the beginning. “How did they measure who lost how much time? This was never said nor documented nor announced,” he said.The court noted this measure and also recorded the submission of Senior Advocate Naresh Kaushik who said for the NTA that the re-test will be notified today itself and will be likely held on June 23. The results of the re-test will be published before June 30 so that the counselling scheduled on July 6 can start, LiveLaw reported Kaushik as having said.One of the several petitions that the court is hearing on the NEET exams this year was one filed by tutorial giant Physics Wallah’s CEO, Alakh Pandey, who said that he had collected representations from about 20,000 students, showing that about 70-80 marks were randomly awarded as grace marks to at least 1,500 of them.Two other petitions on the grace marks were filed by Students Islamic Organisation of India members Abdullah Mohammed Faiz and Dr. Shaik Roshan Mohiddin, and candidate Jaripiti Kartheek, both of whom had questioned that statistical impossibility of the award of marks. Kartheek’s petition was disposed of.The court has kept alive parts of the two other petitions that refer to issues like the alleged paper leak.