SC orders reducing girl candidate's two marks awarded by HC

Updated on: Monday, August 22, 2011

The Supreme Court ordered reduction of two additional marks awarded to a girl candidate for 2007 all-India medical entrance test by the Patna High Court, albeit rightly, during adjudication of her plea for reevaluation of her answer sheets.

A bench of justices R V Raveendran and A K Patnaik ordered the deduction of the girl's marks, deprecating the high court's judges' turning answer script evaluators, saying the judges need not determine what is wise and prudent in academic arena.

"The court should be extremely reluctant to substitute its own views as to what is wise, prudent and proper in relation to academic matters in reference to those formulated by professional men possessing technical expertise and rich experience of actual day-to-day working of educational institutions and the departments controlling them," the bench said, reiterating an old apex court ruling on a similar issue.

The apex court gave its ruling on an appeal by the Central Board of Secondary Education which also conducts the entrance test for various medical colleges across the country.

CBSE had come to the apex court challenging two concurrent rulings of the Patna High Court which had awarded two additional marks to Khushboo Srivastava for the 2007 medical entrance test after reevaluating her Chemistry and Botany papers.

The award of two additional marks by the high court to Khushboo, originally an unsuccessful candidate in the test, had entitled her to a seat in the medical college.

Before the apex court ruling, she was, however, able to take admission in a medical college and the apex court bench said her admission will not be disturbed due to its judgement.

Khushboo had moved the high court seeking reevaluation of her papers, claiming she had performed better than the marks awarded to her.

But on the girl's insistence about her performance in the test, the single judge bench asked her to deposit a sum of Rs 25,000 to ascertain the bonafides of her claim.

On reevaluation of the girl's answer sheets in Botany and Chemistry, the bench found that her two right answers were not given due marks and accordingly gave her two more marks. The high court's pision bench too upheld its single-judge bench's order.

But the apex court reversed the high court's judgement also saying "it will be wholly wrong for the court to make a pedantic and purely idealistic approach to the problems of this nature, isolated from the actual realities and grassroot problems involved in the working of the system and unmindful of the consequences which would emanate if a purely idealistic view as opposed to a pragmatic one were to be propounded."

SC orders reducing girl candidate's two marks awarded by HC

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