The Madras High Court has directed the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur to redo the rank list for IIT Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced this year.
The court ordered to place on top of the list, candidates who had strictly complied with the instructions to give numerical answers up to the second decimal place such as 7.00 followed by those who had answered up to one decimal place such as 7.0 and then the students who simply gave the integer 7 as the answer.
‘Selection not affected’
Allowing a writ petition filed by 17-year-old L. Lakshmi Sree of Chennai, Justice S. Vaidyanathan said that though there was absolutely no difference between 7 and 7.00, students who had followed the pre-examination instructions scrupulously must be given preference as against those who had not followed them.
“By giving such preference, the total number of candidates, who have been selected are not going to be affected. Instead, their ranking alone will be changed,” the judge said.
He pointed out that the instructions issued to the candidates before the commencement of the examinations on May 20 clearly stated that all eight questions for which the answers had to be given in numerical values should be in decimal notations truncated or rounded off to the second decimal place.
However, after the examinations, IIT-Kanpur came up with a clarification stating that if an answer to a question was the integer 11, all answers entered as 11, 11.0 or 11.00 would be treated as correct.
Assailing the clarification, the petitioner contended that it was not fair to give equal preference to those who had not followed the instructions properly.
Finding force in her submissions, the judge on June 7 passed an interim order directing IIT-Kanpur to evaluate the answer scripts strictly on the basis of pre-examination instructions and not on the basis of the clarification.
