SC REMOVES ITS STAY OVER ADMISSIONS IN IITs

To the widespread joy of more than 50,000 IIT hopefuls, the Supreme Court removed its stay on the admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The stay was ordered in the first place because of the controversy on the issue of awarding bonus marks to all students who showed up in the JEE (Advanced) 2017 examination.

Justice Dipak Misra led bench of judges, said that the court do not want to meddle in this affair and was lifting its stay order, given on July 7, leaving various students who had already qualified the exam in the middle of the process.

The court issued a notice to the IIT examination authorities that such sorts of blunders in printing and setting question paper ought not to happen again.

Extra marks were given to make up for mistakes in two of the papers. Marks for them were granted regardless of whether a student had attempted these or not. The examination was carried out for the current year by the IIT Madras and the choice to give extra marks was taken by it.

The stay order was given after a writ request of recorded by Aishwarya Agarwal, who appeared in the exam. Spoken for by Vikas Singh, senior advocate, she had contended that awarding 18 extra marks to all applicants isn’t right.

The insights uncovered the repercussions of the examination authorities’ decision. Out of 1.59 lakh students who showed up for the exam, 50,455 were proclaimed to have passed the admission test to different IITs this year, while only 36,566 students qualified the test a year ago.

The JEE (Advanced) is the second stage of the IIT entrance tests and is carried out by one of the IITs every year. The All India Rank is arranged after the tests and different IITs are distributed to qualifying candidates.

Applicant also contended that the All India Rank list ought to be amended subsequent to filtering students who were awarded the extra marks, irrelevant of whether they had attempted the questions or not.  Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said this would in fact be a twisted errand and warned the examination authorities to make no such mistakes in the future.