by Disha Saxena

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court declined to order the identification and elimination of allegedly dishonest candidates from the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main rank list. The entire selection process would be upended and a Pandora's box would be opened, according to Justice Sanjeev Narula, who also stated that such a "drastic step" can be approved when the alleged errors are "egregious enough" to "reasonably conclude that the entire list is manifestly and intrinsically flawed."

 

The National Testing Agency (NTAcommon )'s rank list, according to a JEE candidate, was inaccurate because it included candidates twice, and if the list is changed, she will be eligible for JEE Advanced, the court ruled on an application for interim relief in regard to the petition. The court noted that the online system was unable to stop a candidate from registering more than once for each of the two JEE Mains sessions. As a result, some candidates may have registered for the second session under a different application number, which caused candidates who passed the cut-off in both sessions to appear twice in the rank list.

 

The NTA asserted that there were only ten instances of duplication based on their specifications, despite the petitioner providing 13 scorecards with putative instances of duplication and asserting that there were hundreds of them. The court noted that the petitioner's allegation that there were thousands of duplicates was a "bald assertion without any supporting material," but agreed to look into the matter further. It also gave the petitioner time to file a response to NTA's claim and ordered NTA to provide complete details and data to back up its assertion.

"Duplications would need to be removed, which would leave holes in the rank list and force a redrawing of the entire list, which, in the judgment of the court, would upset the entire system for administering the exam and the selection process. Additionally, the court would have no justification to limit the benefit to just the Petitioner "According to the court's order from August 26.

"Significantly, the exercise for duplication discovery and elimination would require uprooting the entire list of chosen candidates. If the court grants the request, it will inevitably mean that the cut-off score will need to be adjusted, and that's only on the presumption that there will be more duplicates than what NTA has confirmed "It read.

 

According to the court, considering the number of candidates who have been shortlisted, even if there are some overlaps—which cannot be determined with certainty at this point—it cannot be said that seats would remain vacant due to such alleged overlaps or that the petitioner would advance to the next round. The court denied the request for temporary relief, stating that the "hypothetical errors" and "few isolated incidents" acknowledged by NTA, which had no bearing on the outcome, could not be used as justification for undertaking the "massive exercise of re-calculating the cut-off score and recasting the list of selected candidates."