Mumbai: Noting that it must not engage in assessing individual marks or comparing them with model answer sheets, a task best left to experts like National Testing Agency (NTA), Bombay high court (HC) denied permission to an IIT aspirant to take the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) (Advanced), after he was held ineligible.
A division bench of Justices AS Chandurkar and MM Sathaye said it found no reason to interfere in a challenge raised in a petition against NTA’s decision endorsing the student’s scorecard for JEE (Mains) as ‘UFM’, as ‘case of unfair means’ and held him ineligible.

A student challenging his scores said he scored 99.51 percentile in a ‘sample’ scorecard downloaded on Feb 11, the result date. An hour later, he “was shocked to see” his score at 83.34 percentile.
HC verified the QR code on the scorecard provided by the student and found it did not reflect marks he claimed, rather the one NTA declared. HC said: “In our view, this puts at rest the dispute as raised… at least for the purpose of this petition.”
NTA, that conducts JEE, barred the student from JEE (Mains) for 2025-26 and 2026-27, the agency’s counsel Rui Rodrigues submitted.
HC, kept the contentions on merits over debarment, open. As the aspirant is young with educational endeavours at stake, he is at liberty to challenge his debarment which should then be decided based on applicable rules, the judges said.
The student’s counsels, Ranjit Bhosale and Prashant Mali, sought order for NTA to delete the ‘UFM’ remark, correct his scorecard based on 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 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 Public Examination (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024.”
HC said: “We have no reason to disbelieve NTA. It has no reason to single out the petitioner…” It said that it was not imputing any ill-intention to the student or his parents.