The Delhi High Court on Friday refused to pass any orders to keep the CBSE Class XII exam verification and re-evaluation portal open for more time, amid concerns about alleged irregularities in the board's On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
A vacation bench of Justices Neena Bansal Krishna and Madhu Jain said that passing such an order would eventually lead to a delay in the exam results and that it did not want to cause that.
The Bench said that if individual students are aggrieved, they can approach the Court.
It then listed a public interest litigation (PIL) filed on the OSM issue by the National Students Union of India (NSUI) before the roster bench after the vacations.
"For you, it’s one week, but the whole process gets delayed by a month. It’s not the question of one step; it's the question of three other steps. If you enter now, it [results] will be delayed by a month. Let individuals approach. Let individuals come here and say," the Bench remarked.
Solicitor General (SG) Tushar Mehta appeared for the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) today and told the Court that the prayers sought in the PIL would delay the process and affect students' higher education prospects.
"Students who are aggrieved have come to us. Over 1.67 lakh student have applied for evaluation. Now their [petitioner's] request is to extend the deadline. At the behest of whom? Any delay would delay all 7.8 lakh students [who appeared for Class XII CBSE exams] because based on these marks, you get admission in all undergraduate studies, where the deadline is fixed," Mehta stated.
Advocate Muhammad Ali Khan appeared for the NSUI and argued that many of the students affected by irregularities in the OSM system cannot approach the High Court individually.
He said that when the portal was opened, there were several glitches and that he was only requesting the Court to extend the window by a few more days.
"Many of them [students] are minors, they don’t have the resources to come to Court. They have extended it [the re-evaluation window] twice. I am asking it to be extended for four more days," Khan stated.
However, the Bench refused to pass any such orders.
Filed through NSUI President Vinod Jhakhar, the petition before the Court has sought directions for the award of compensatory marks to students whose answer scripts were missing, blurred or incorrectly evaluated.
The petitioner said there should be an independent inquiry “into the large-scale irregularities, deficiencies, technical issues and grievance-related failures concerning the OSM system” and orders for manual rechecking and physical verification of answer sheets in cases where students dispute the correctness of the scanned copies or the evaluation process.
Further, directions have been sought to keep the verification and re-evaluation portal open for an additional month to allow affected students to seek remedies.
The plea highlighted that class 12 marks play a critical role in determining admissions to universities, scholarships and professional courses, making any evaluation errors potentially detrimental to students’ academic futures.
According to the petition, students, parents and teachers across the country reported issues including blurred scanned answer sheets, missing pages, incomplete uploads, answer-sheet mismatches and unexpectedly low marks after the declaration of results.
As per the petitioner, these complaints indicate systemic flaws in the OSM system rather than isolated incidents.
CBSE’s public communications had acknowledged technical glitches on the portal used for accessing scanned answer books, it was contended.
Approximately 1,27,146 applications relating to 3,87,399 scanned answer sheets were submitted within a short period after the results were announced.