A Special Bench of the Supreme Court will hear a plea on Friday to cancel the Central Board of Secondary Education and Indian Certificate of Secondary Education exams for Class 12 students due to COVID-19.
A Bench of Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and Dinesh Maheshwari is scheduled to hear a petition filed by advocate Mamta Sharma. “Issue a writ of mandamus directing the respondents to cancel the examination for Class 12 and devise an objective methodology to declare the result within a specific time-frame,” Ms. Sharma has urged.
Ms. Sharma said the CBSE and ICSE notifications deferring the exams to an unspecified date should be quashed. It said students cannot be made to suffer uncertainty in the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The petition said there should not be any uncertainty regarding exams crucial to the future academic study of Class 12 students.
Last year, the apex court had asked the Boards to determine and declare Class 12 exam results on the basis of their earlier grading. The petitioner said the same methodology could be used this year too. Both Boards cannot remain mute spectators and opt to wait and watch for the pandemic wave to ebb. Delay would put the future of the students in peril.
Ms. Sharma said the Boards had already cancelled the Class 10 exams. The same should be done for Class 12 students.
“As far as the innocent students of Class12 are concerned, a step-motherly, arbitrary, inhuman direction has been issued to postpone their final examination for an unspecified duration, instead of following the directions propounded and accepted by them last year,” the petition said.
