Students of different schools protesting outside CBSE office in sector-5, Panchkula against paper leak case last month. Express photo by Jaipal Singh
The Delhi High Court on Monday dismissed a plea seeking change of the re-examination date of the Class 12 Economics paper. The exam is scheduled to be held on April 25 by the CBSE after an alleged leak. The bench also asked the CBSE to place before it the records relating to the board’s decision not to conduct re-examination of Class 10 mathematics examination, which also was allegedly leaked, after a plea seeking a re-test came up.
The court asked the CBSE advocate to find out the reasons for the decision for not reconducting the examination and listed the plea filed by a student for April 20. A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar rejected the plea filed by an NGO, Suniye, seeking to either change the date of re-examination of class 12 exam or make it optional on the ground that the decided date was close to some entrance examinations, including National Defence Academy (NDA) and engineering.
The court said it was the CBSE’s decision to reconduct the exam and was outside its purview. The bench said a judicial notice has been taken of the fact that there can be no date fixed to the satisfaction of all and rescheduling of the re-test was beyond the jurisdiction of the court.
“Whether to hold an exam or not, it is up to the CBSE. It is not up to the court to decide. It is outside our purview. As you are saying NDA exam is clashing. If they again change the date, somebody else will come. On what basis a court can say hold the exam on this day and not on that day. It will be anarchy,” the court said.
During the hearing, the court was informed by CBSE advocate Amit Bansal that it has issued a notification that class 10th maths examination will not be reconducted as they cannot afford to hold it again and make over 16 lakh students appear in it.
The board also opposed the intervention application of the NGO saying it has considered all the aspects before scheduling the class 12th economics exam on April 25 and due care was taken while selecting the date.
The court was hearing a PIL, in which NGO Social Jurist had sought that CBSE be directed to hold the class 10 exam in April, if required, and not in July as it had proposed earlier. It disposed of the PIL after NGO’s counsel Ashok Agarwal said he was satisfied with the board’s decision of not holding the re-examination for the class 10th paper.
The CBSE, in its affidavit, had earlier said it had decided not to hold re-examination of class 10 Maths test as a scientific evaluation of random answer sheets did not indicate any unusual pattern to believe that there was widespread benefit of the alleged paper leak.
It had said it was not conducting the re-test for another reason that class 10 was a gateway to class 11 and therefore “remains largely an internal segment of school education system”.
The NGO had also sought a court-monitored probe into the recent leak of the Maths and Economics question papers of class 10 and 12 respectively.