NEW DELHI: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur has appealed against a Madras High Court order that threatens to overthrow the ranking list of JEE-advanced this year. Meanwhile when the third round of seat allocation through JEE-Advanced has been halted after the Court directed IIT, Kanpur, the host institution for the coveted test this year, to redo the rank list.
"We have approached the Court against the direction and any further development in the admission process will now depend on that," Shalabh, organising chairman of JEE-Advanced told The New Indian Express.
The court, last week, had ordered ordered to place on top of the list, candidates who had strictly complied with the instructions to give numerical answers up to the second decimal place such as 7.00 followed by those who had answered up to one decimal place such as 7.0 and then the students who simply gave the integer 7 as the answer.
Allowing a writ petition filed by 17-year-old L. Lakshmi Sree of Chennai who has successfully qualified the examination, Justice S. Vaidyanathan had said said that though there was absolutely no difference between 7 and 7.00, students who had followed the pre-examination instructions scrupulously must be given preference as against those who had not followed the instructions.
Aditya Mittal, JEE-Advanced chairman of IIT-Delhi too said that that institutes were now hoping to get a case respite, in absence of which the whole system is stuck at an impasse. The Court order, meanwhile, has been described as "strange" by experts. Dheeraj Sanghi, a professor of Computer Science at IIT, Kanpur said that the court is not pleased and has now come up with a specific order, which is very "strange" and does not explain its own order.
"It is not saying that answer 2 or 2.0 is wrong as per the instructions and should get 0 marks It is saying that students should be penalized for not following the instruction and hence if two students have same marks and one student has followed the instruction and another has not then the student who has followed the instruction should be kept higher in the ranking," Sanghi wrote in his blog.
By saying that 2 is an inferior answer than 2.00, first of all court is declaring that answers could be inferior or superior. For an extremely technical point, the court to make such a ruling is, to say the least, strange, he went on to add. The professor also wrote that last year, when IIT JEE had done lots of wrongs and yet courts supported them.
"I had written in my blog that for a long time courts have been ignoring anything and everything IITs do. They are letting IITs get away with murder. I didn't know that in just one year, we will have a complete U turn in the circumstances where the courts will support students who can't even interpret instructions properly and ask IITs to penalize those who understand and interpret the instructions properly," he also wrote.