On July 10, the apex court allowed the counselling and admission into Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) across the country on the basis of the results of the IIT-JEE (Advance) 2017 results by lifting the stay on the move.
On Friday, last week, the Supreme Court desk led by Justice Dipak Misra lifted its stay ordered but asked high courts not to interfere in the petitions regarding counselling and admission to the IITs to avoid any hustle-bustle.
It is through the process of counselling that a candidate, who has cleared the entrance, chooses the best college and stream according to his or her choice based on their rank.
The bench asked the IITs to give an undertaking that such mistakes will not take place again and ensure that no situation in which bonus marks have to be awarded arose in future.
The bench continues to stand ground on the decision, in contrast to the one for the Guru Nanak University case in 2005, because, as is obvious, in the present matter, there are a huge number of students involved and there is a system of negative marking in the exam. It was also observed that an experts’ body of IITs had met twice to decide that bonus marks should be awarded across the board for the wrong questions.
On July 7, the Supreme Court had restrained the IITs from conducting further counselling and admissions saying the court will go by its earlier judgement of 2005 and bonus marks cannot be given to those who have not attempted the wrong questions. However, it was pointed out by the AG that there was negative marking for every unsuccessful question and there may be some students who had opted not to answer “they said vague questions fearing negative marking”.
Hence, all candidates were granted bonus marks, where, if meant otherwise, the IITs would have to strike down the marks. It was also made clear that it was extremely difficult to re-evaluate the answer sheets of over two lakh students who took the examination and awarding of bonus marks across the board was the most practical solution. On June 30, SC issued a notice to the MHRD with a plea seeking to quash of the IIT-JEE 2017 rank list.
The petition that had been due to the Supreme Court was filed by an IIT aspirant Aishwarya Agarwal, and ever since then, many other candidates have raised their voices.
