The apex court observed that the petition is ‘ill-advised’ and ‘premature’ and the authorities are yet to take appropriate decision with regard to conducting exams of the various boards
Representational image. ANI
The Supreme Court Wednesday refused to entertain a plea seeking cancellation of offline board examinations for classes 10 and 12 to be conducted by the CBSE and several other boards this year.
A bench headed by Justice AM Khanwilkar observed that such petition creates false hope and confusion all over. This creates not only false hopes, it creates confusion all over to students who are preparing, said the bench, also comprising Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and CT Ravikumar. “Such petitions give false hope to the persons who are going to appear in the examinations. Those students will be misled by this petition. Let the authorities take decision. If the decision is wrong, challenge that decision. Here, you want to pre-empt everything,” the bench said.
The CBSE has decided to conduct term two board exams for class 10 and class 12 from 26 April.
‘Ill-advised and premature’
The apex court observed that the petition is “ill-advised” and “premature” and the authorities are yet to take appropriate decision with regard to conducting exams of the various boards.
The counsel appearing for the petitioners said that most of the state boards have not yet declared the dates for examinations. “
Whenever examination is due, they will declare those dates, what is the problem,” the bench observed.
The bench said that authorities in states are aware of ground realities and will take a call as and when they have planned logistics and other requirements.
The plea had been filed by Anubha Shrivastava Sahai, an advocate and child rights activist and a students’ union from Odisha. The petition also sought an alternative assessment mechanism as formulated in the past year for admission to undergraduate (UG) courses.
At the outset, the counsel appearing for the petitioners, AS Sahai and others, referred to the order passed by the apex court last year in the matter pertaining to board exams amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The bench said what had happened in the past cannot be the basis to pass order now. “Entertaining such petitions is creating more confusion in the system. Let the authorities take decision,” the bench said.
“Our main priority is getting rid of physical board exams completely this year. We want the Supreme Court to instruct the boards to conduct internal assessments for students,” said Sahai, as per Indian Express. She said that the motive behind this is to make sure that students do not have to take any additional mental stress, as they have already “suffered mentally, physically and financially during the last two years due to COVID-19”.
The petitioners and students were hoping that if the physical board exams cannot be changed into internal assessment completely, the boards should at least change it to objective questions, rather than subjective questions-based exam.
Since the past few exams were MCQ/objective based, students said that they lost the habit of writing. “I have now been writing down all my notes, rather than typing them out because I had completely lost the habit of writing in the past few years. Now, more than revising for my board exams, I am instead doing writing practice. So it is unfair to us, and sounds very silly to me. CBSE needs to sort out its priority rather than sticking up to old thought process,” a Class 12 student from Chandigarh toldIndian Express.
However, the bench observed, “let the students do their job and let the authorities do their jobs.”
With inputs from PTI
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