Karnataka HC permits State to consider 'normalisation' of marks for CET repeaters

The court clarified that the 'normalisation' procedure should be considered for the limited purpose of ascertaining the rank for CET and not for any other purposes.
Karnataka High Court (Photo | EPS)
Karnataka High Court (Photo | EPS)

BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Friday permitted the state government to issue an order to consider the 'Root Mean Square' (RMS) methodology suggested by the committee of experts to deduct by an average of 6 marks in Physics, 5 marks in Chemistry and 7 marks in Mathematics for 'normalisation' of the marks for the students who have passed the Second PUC in 2021 and consider their Second PU marks along with the CET-2022 marks for the ratio of 50:50 to ascertain the rank afresh for the CET-2022.

Therefore, the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) would assign fresh ranks to all the candidates of CET-2022, both who appeared for Second PU in 2021 and in 2022, after the process of normalisation of marks of CET repeaters, for admission to undergraduate engineering and technology courses.

A division bench of Acting Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice S Vishwajith Shetty passed the order with the CET-2022 repeaters agreeing to 'normalisation' of their Second PU marks of 2021 based on a scientific methodology suggested by the committee. Before this, the court after going through the report, orally observed that both the state government and KEA have done a remarkable job in finding a solution for an unusual issue.

The court clarified that the 'normalisation' procedure should be considered for the limited purpose of ascertaining the rank for CET and not for any other purposes.

With this order, the court disposed of the appeals filed by the KEA and State Government questioning the order passed by the single judge on September 3, 2022. The single judge had set aside the ranks assigned to CET repeaters without considering their Second PU marks awarded in 2021 without conducting examination due to Covid-19. While doing so, it also directed the State and KEA to redo the rank list of CET-2022.

The division bench passed the order after the consensus evolved that the second method can be the basis for assigning the rankings for CET repeaters. The report of the committee headed by Vice Chairman, Karnataka State Higher Education Council, Dr B Thimme Gowda, was constituted on September 20 after the court asked both State and KEA were asked to find a solution that can be acceptable to both parties. Accordingly, the committee submitted the report before the division bench on Thursday.

The committee clarified in the report that using the basis of 50 percent qualifying examination marks and 50 percent of CET marks, for determining the ranks for the Covid batch students may improve their ranking and this may affect the ranking of post-Covid batch students to some extent.

Therefore, in order to safeguard the interest of post-Covid batch students also, the committee suggested that seats in IT-related branches in colleges as per previous year's preferred selection of seats may be increased by about 10 percent.

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