MUMBAI: Observing that the high court should not engage in the exercise of assessing individual marks or comparing them with model answer sheets, a task best left to experts like the National Testing Agency (NTA), the Bombay High Court denied permission to an IIT aspirant to appear for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) (Advanced), after he was held ineligible.
The High Court division bench of Justices AS Chandurkar and MM Sathaye said it found no reason to interfere in a challenge raised in a petition against a decision of the NTA that endorsed the student’s scorecard for JEE (Mains) as ‘UFM’, as ‘case of unfair means’ and held him ineligible for JEE (Advanced).
A student challenging his scores said he scored 99.51 percentile in a ‘sample’ scorecard he downloaded on February 11, the date of the result. But an hour later, he “was shocked to see” his score was at 83.34 percentile.
The High Court verified the QR code on the scorecard provided by the student and found it did not reflect the marks he claimed, rather the one NTA declared. “The scorecard PDF relied upon by the Petitioner has failed the QR-code-validity test,” the High Court held adding, “In our view, this puts at rest the dispute as raised…at least for the purpose of this petition.”
The exam conducted was held on January 24, 2025, in 618 centres, across 304 cities with 12,58,136 students appearing for it.
The NTA conducts the JEE for lakhs who take the highly competitive exam to secure admission to the globally renowned STEM institute and barred the petitioner from JEE (Mains) for 2025-26 and 2026-27, the agency’s counsel Rui Rodrigues submitted.
The High Court, however, kept the contentions on merits over the debarment, open. Since the aspirant is young with his educational endeavours at stake, he is at liberty to challenge his debarment which should then be decided based on applicable rules, the Judges sid.
The student’s counsel, Ranjit Bhosale and Prashant Mali, sought order for NTA to delete the ‘UFM’ remark, correct his scorecard based on the questions he answered for IIT (Mains), an independent evaluation of his answer sheet and an enquiry against those responsible for “discrepancies”.
The Centre’s advocate, Gargi Warunjikar and NTA both opposed his plea. Rodrigues said NTA has no practice of issuing a ‘sample result’ and submitted, “the Petitioner is liable for an offence punishable under the Public Examination (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024.”
“We have no reason to disbelieve NTA. It has no reason to single out the Petitioner from among lakhs of students who appeared,” said the HC But also added that it was not imputing any ill-intention to the student or his parents.