SC vacates its stay, allows counselling and admissions to IITs

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed counselling and admission into Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) across the country on the basis of the IIT-JEE (Advance) 2017 results by vacating its stay on it. The apex court bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra vacated its stay ordered last Friday but asked the high courts not to interfere in the petitions regarding counselling and admission to the institutes to avoid any confusion.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and M M Shantanagoudar, asked the IITs to give an undertaking that such mistakes will not recur and make sure that no situation in which bonus marks have to be awarded arose in future. Attorney General K K Venugopal, representing the IITs, said that such a situation will not arise in the future. The bench said that the 2005 judgement in the Guru Nanak University case will not apply in the present matter as there were a huge number of students involved and there was a system of negative marking in the exam.

The apex court had on June 30 issued a notice to the Ministry of Human Resource Development on a plea seeking the quashing of the IIT-JEE 2017 rank list. On July 7, it restrained the IITs from conducting further counselling and admissions

The apex court also noted that an experts' body of IITs had met twice to decide that bonus marks should be awarded across the board for the wrong questions. The Supreme Court had on July 7 restrained the IITs from conducting further counselling and admissions saying that the court will go by its 2005 judgement and bonus marks could not be given to those who had not attempted the wrong questions. The AG had, however, pointed out that there was negative marking for every unsuccessful question and there may be some students who had opted not to answer "the said vague questions fearing negative marking".

Therefore, across the board bonus marks were given to the candidates, Venugopal had told the court, adding that otherwise, the IITs would have to strike down the marks. The AG had also said that it was difficult to re-evaluate the answer sheets of over two lakh student. The petition, filed by an IIT aspirant Aishwarya Agarwal, had sought the court's direction. Since then, several other students had approached the apex court seeking to quash the rank list. Several aspirants in their pleas had sought a direction for preparation of the All-India rank list after rectifying the scores of JEE (Advanced) and also to award marks for the incorrect questions to the candidates who had attempted the right answers.