Bhubaneswar/New Delhi: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) was today pulled up by the Delhi High Court for not notifying on its site that re-evaluation was permissible in all subjects of class 12.
The decision of the HC came against the backdrop of the Board's reluctance to accept applications for re-evaluation even after the court’s July 6 direction. The CBSE was directed to re-evaluate the answer sheets of all the subjects of all Class 12 students who wrote the class 12 examination this year and were seeking re-evaluation.
The Board, however, maintained in its defense that the deadline for accepting applications was July 7, as per an earlier order of the court, adding that re-evaluation cannot be an open-ended exercise.
However, the court did not accept the argument of CBSE and asked: "Why did you not post our order online on your website? You gave the students only one-day time (on July 7) to apply for re-evaluation without even informing them about our decision (of July 6)."
The Court further said that once it passed the order on July 6, the July 7 deadline no longer applied.
In its July 6 order, the court had said: "The relief (of re-evaluation) is not confined only to the petitioners before it and shall be admissible to all the similarly situated students who seek re-evaluation of their answer sheets".
During the proceedings, the court told the lawyers, appearing for some students whose answer sheets were not re- evaluated by the Board, to file an application and said it would pass appropriate orders thereafter.
The observations came during hearing of a plea filed by four students against the CBSEs June 28 notice imposing certain conditions with regard to re-evaluation of answer sheets.
The high court had set aside the conditions that the right of applying for scrutiny was limited to 12 subjects only, with maximum 10 questions per subject and a revised mark sheet would be issued only if the marks increased by five or were reduced by one.
The marks of all four petitioner students saw substantial increase; their lawyers told the bench today which said to CBSE, "Have you looked at the disparity? 64 marks have become 93 (in one case). That is too much."
When the Board said that in most cases the increase was of only one of two marks, the court remarked that "even one mark makes a lot of difference".
The court has now fixed August 29 for further hearing on the matter.
It is worth mentioning that Orissa High Court, on June 30, had granted additional seven days time to CBSE to provide photocopies of answer sheets to 159 students in the State who had earlier moved the court demanding re-evaluation after alleged discrepancies in the publication of the Class XII results.