New Delhi, Jun 18 (PTI): The CBSE told the Supreme Court on Thursday it will be “impossible” for it to hold the 2015 All-India Pre-Medical/Pre-Dental Entrance Test afresh within four weeks as ordered by the court last Friday after cases of cheating were reported in the original May 3 exam.

A bench of justices R.K. Agrawal and A.M. Sapre decided to take up a petition of the Central Board of Secondary Education seeking reconsideration of the apex court's June 15 order after Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar mentioned the matter before it.

Kumar said it is impossible to re-conduct the AIPMT within the time frame decided by the Supreme Court, since the board is conducting seven exams simultaneously and it needs at least three months to hold it afresh.

The AIPMT is the gateway to a quota of seats at medical and dental colleges across the country under the Director General of Health Services. This year, around 6,30,000 students wrote the AIPMT, and the results were due on June 5, but the Supreme Court stayed the announcement.

The apex court had directed the re-examination in view of large-scale cheating in the test with students getting answers in the examination hall at many places.

On June 12, while reserving its order, the court had said the examination stands vitiated even if one student is being benefited illegally.

It had said that CBSE could not be held guilty as such but taking into consideration the past incidents, “CBSE ought to have been cognisant of these things”.

CBSE, however, had opposed the contentions seeking cancellation of the test, arguing that 6.3 lakh students cannot be made to take the exam afresh when only 44 students have been found involved in taking benefits through unfair means.

The court had said, “The bigger issue is that the sanctity of the examination is under suspicion. We want to be doubly sure that there is no alternative but to order re-conduct of the exam,” adding that it did not want to take a decision “in haste”.