The plea challenging the ‘normalisation’ procedure adopted in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains exam was rejected by the Delhi High Court a few days back.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) conducts a procedure called Normalisation which compares a candidate’s scores across the question papers of multiple sessions so that a student is not deprived or given advantage by the difficulty level of a particular session’s exam.
On February 27, Justice C Hari Shankar rejected the plea filed by one Setu Vinit Goenka against the normalisation procedure at the threshold (in limine).
The Court said that the process of normalisation puts away the discrepancy which arises due to unavoidable possibility of different papers being of different difficulty levels.
NTA contended that normalisation on percentile basis is a detailed statistical process followed around the world.
The Court said that although it does not possess the expertise to subjectively go into the intricacies of the normalisation procedure.
It further added that this was a matter of academic policy, in which the Court has to defer to the authorities, unless the procedure is found to be so arbitrary or resulting in constitutionally unsustainable results which the court does not uphold at any cost. No such case has been made out in the averments contained in the present writ petition.
The single-judge Justice Hari Shankar stated that this is no easy decision as wthe courts must be conscious even while issuing notice in cases like the present one where lakhs of students are involved.
The Justice stated that the very fact that an examination such as the IIT JEE, which governs entrance to IITs, NITs and other centrally funded technical institutions, may be subject matter of a Court proceeding, is itself a serious issue.
Justice observed that intervention of court creates uncertainty in the minds of students who attempt the papers. Courts have, therefore, to be extremely careful even while issuing notice in such cases. It is only if the procedure being followed is constitutionally completely unacceptable that such cases deserve issuance of notice.
The petitioner Setu Vinit Goenka approached the High Court arguing that the normalisation process is unjust and unfair for students.
It was stated that normalisation factor is not disclosed by the NTA.
The Justice also contended that normalisation should not be a ground for judging the performance of any student as they all appear for the same exam through different shifts randomly allocated by NTA.
The Court added after due consulations that the raw scores of a candidate differ from the percentile scores which are ultimately assigned to students based on normalisation.
The plea was contested by the NTA which argued that a total of 12 lakh candidates appear for the JEE exam and to ensure complete transparency, it is not possible to provide the same question paper to all candidates in the country.
The Court found that the submssion was speculative in nature and rejected the same.