The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to interfere with a Madras High Court judgment upholding the abolition of Common Entrance Test for admission to professional courses in Tamil Nadu.
A Bench of Justice B. Sudershan Reddy and Justice S.S. Nijjar dismissed a special leave petition filed by Minor A.S. Prabhu against an April 27, 2007 judgment.
The Tamil Nadu Admission in Professional Educational Institutions Act 2006, which received Presidential assent on March 3, 2007, envisages admission to professional courses from 2007-08 on the basis of marks obtained in the higher secondary examination.
The petitioner contended that the impugned legislation was violative of Articles 14 (right to equality) and 21 (right to life and liberty) of the Constitution as the methods of ‘normalisation' for finding the ‘relative marks' of students in different streams of study would create more inequality. He said the Supreme Court had conclusively decided that to determine uniform standards in education, admission through CET was the best method, which had been approved by the Medical Council of India and the All India Council for Technical Education.
He said that as the number of students getting 100 per cent in core subjects like Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology was more, getting qualifying marks in the higher secondary examination would not resolve the tie among equally meritorious students.
The SLP said that the High Court, while upholding the law, had exceeded its authority by considering irrelevant, extraneous, extravagant factors such as social justice instead of relying on constitutional principles.
The State justified the law contending that the CET was found to go against poor students from the rural and urban areas as they could not get the benefit of specialised coaching for appearing in the examination.
