New Delhi: In a big relief for students, the Supreme Court on Monday vacated the stay and gave a go-ahead for conducting counselling and admission for Indian Institute of Technology, National Institute of Technology and other engineering colleges. Nearly 33,000 students were allotted seats in different colleges across the country.
The apex court had last week directed IITs, NITs and other engineering colleges to stay their counselling and admission forthwith.
On July 6, the joint admission board of IIT had told the top court that it is not possible to revise the merit list of Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) by scrapping bonus marks awarded to all students for wrong questions.
IIT had justified its decision to award bonus marks to all students to ensure that no candidate was prejudiced on account of printing inconsistencies. The IIT had said that the decision on bonus marks was taken by a committee of experts after exploring all other options.
On June 30, the court had issued notice to the Ministry of Human Resource Development on a plea seeking quashing of the IIT-JEE 2017 rank list. The petition, filed by IIT aspirant Aishwarya Agarwal, had sought the court’s direction to declare that the action of awarding “bonus marks” to the candidates who had appeared in the JEE (Advanced) 2017 examination was wrong and violated her right, as well as that of other students.
Around 1.7 lakh students had registered for the JEE-Advanced examination in 2017 and 1.6 lakh appeared for the test.Around 1.7 lakh students had registered for the JEE-Advanced examination in 2017 and 1.6 lakh appeared for the test. Out of the total, 50,455 students were declared to have qualified and are vying for 11,032 seats across 23 IITs.
