The Madras High Court on Friday sought the reply of Union Ministry of Human Resource Development and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to a public interest litigation petition questioning the propriety of allowing physically challenged candidates who had scored as low as -35 marks in Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains 2018 to write JEE Advanced conducted for admission to undergraduate programmes in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
First Division Bench of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice P.T. Asha granted three weeks time to the Centre as well as CBSE to file their counter affidavits and one more week thereafter for the PIL petitioner to file his rejoinder. During the course of arguments, the judges expressed surprise over the claim of negative marks having been fixed as the qualifying marks to take up advanced examinations and wanted to know the logic behind permitting such a practice.
S. Sudhakar, 54, an industrialist from Coimbatore, had filed the PIL petition contending that the methodology adopted by CBSE, which had been entrusted with the task of conducting JEE Mains, in awarding marks and determining the cut-off was flawed. Claiming that the qualifying marks were on a declining trend year after year, he said the cut-off mark for physically challenged candidates was just one mark during the JEE held in 2017 and it had come down to -35 this year.
The petitioner’s counsel, K. Ravi Anantha Padmanabhan, said 10.43 lakh students took JEE Mains in April this year at 1,613 centres in 112 cities across the country. Of them, 2.31 lakh got selected for the JEE Advanced last month and the selection was based on answers they gave to 90 objective type questions which carried four marks for each correct answer and one negative mark for every incorrect answer.