The Karnataka High Court has granted relief to the petitioners appealing against the Karnataka Examinations Authority's decision to not include the Pre-University Colleges (PUC) or Class XII marks from students of the 2021 batch, who repeated the Karnataka Common Entrance Test (KCET) this year in the merit score.
The judgement was passed today, September 3, at 2:30 pm, and comes as a relief to over 24,000 students who have been protesting against the KEA's decision to not give 50% weightage to PUC marks for the 2021 batch in this year's KCET score. After the results were announced, students protested at the KEA office, after which a note was issued on July 30, 2022, by the KEA stating, "As per Government Order no ED147TEC2020 dated 01/09/2021, the qualifying marks of 2021 students were not considered for CET ranking for the Academic Year 2021 and is not considered for 2022-23 as well."
The KEA maintained that since the students of PUC 2021 batch had not written the Board exams due to the COVID-19 pandemic, considering their marks would be discriminatory. The petitioners, on the other hand, said that having different parameters in place for calculating the marks of candidates in a common entrance exam was unfair.
This note was challenged by the petitioners who said that the KEA had no authority to issue it and that the note was arbitrary since the Government Order it referred to applied to the year 2021 only. Now, the Karnataka High Court has admitted the student's appeal and has quashed this note.
"The KEA has also been ordered by the Karnataka High Court to re-do the entire ranking process and produce the KCET merit score for all students, granting 50% weightage to KCET score and 50% weightage to the PUC score," said Advocate Rajendra B Kulkarni, who represented one of the petitioners in the case. "Whatever we had sought from the honourable court has been granted," he added.
