JoSAA 2018 Counselling resumes after a bench of Madras High Court stays order to redo rank list

NEW DELHI, JULY 10: A bench of Madras High Court led by Justices Huluvadi G. Ramesh and M. Dhandapani ruled in favour of IIT Kanpur by staying an order that asked the institute to redo the JEE Advanced rank list for 2018. With this latest judgement, the JoSAA 2018 counselling which was put at abeyance now resumes as per the revised schedule released today by IIT Kanpur on the JEE Advanced website.

On May 20, a written petition was filed by 17-year old aspirant L. Lakshmi Sree of Chennai against the Registrar, IIT Kanpur. According to the petitioner, during the exams, candidates were instructed to answer the numerical value rounded off up to 2 decimal points, failing which marks would be deducted. As per the instructions, the petitioner spent quality time to answer the questions as specified. However, some of the candidates did not go through these instructions carefully and answered without any decimal points or with only one decimal point. However IIT Kanpur has later clarified the same on their website that “if an answer is the integer 11, all the answered entered as 11, 11.0, or 11.00 will be correct.” On July 2, Justice S. Vaidyanathan ruled in favour of the petitioner and asked IIT Kanpur to prepare the ranking list and announce them again.

A bench comprising of Justices Huluvadi G. Ramesh and M. Dhandapani passed the interim order today stating that since the evaluation of the after exams has already completed, the order of the single judge asking to redo the rank list is totally unwarranted. The court observed that the order would only add to the confusion considering that two rounds of seat allotment has already been completed. In addition, since the petitioner has already secured a mechanical engineering seat in IIT Kanpur, such orders are not necessary felt the court.

Following the order, IIT Kanpur has issued the revised schedule on the official website along with mention of the following points as the reasons for the notification

· There have been repeated requests from numerous parents and candidates across IITs who have already finalized their travel bookings as per the displayed start of sessions in different IITs,

· Academic sessions of IITs are to start on time as scheduled earlier,

· All candidates will able to get a fair chance of full participation in, and completion of, the initially declared seven rounds of seat allotment, with the sixth round being the final round in which withdrawal is permissible,

· An assurance that the total number of hours of activities involving “Document Verification and Acceptance/Withdrawal of Seat by reporting at Reporting Centres”, remain the same as originally scheduled for all candidates.

To facilitate students, the reporting centres will not start functioning at 8 am on all working days as per the given schedule to ensure that the number of working hours will be in accordance to the original schedule.

JoSAA 2018 Revised Schedule