JoSAA puts further seat allotment on hold following Madras High Court Order

NEW DELHI, JULY 6 : In a notification released on its website on July 6, JoSAA has announced it is suspending all future seat allotment, document verification and acceptance of seats at reporting centres until further orders from the Madras High Court. The decision follows the court’s directive on July 2 wherein it asked IIT Kanpur, which conducted JEE Advanced 2018, to stick to its original instructions when evaluating papers.

The court in its judgement had held that candidates who have answered in exact numerical value in decimal notification as was instructed originally (in the question paper) should get preference over candidates who have answered by rounding off to one decimal point or without any decimal point.

It may recalled that in the exam guidelines, it was clearly mentioned candidates need to round off to the second decimal place. It also also mentioned full marks would be allotted only if candidates followed these instructions.

However soon after the exam, IIT Kanpur announced that they will award full marks to candidates even if they didn’t round off to the second decimal place. It meant “if the answer to a question is the integer 12, then the following answers 12.0, or 12.00 will also be considered correct”

L Lakshmi Sree from Chennai, who appeared in the entrance exam, however was not convinced by the decision to award full marks to candidates who haven’t followed the instructions. She wrote an email to exam authorities in this regard noting that awarding full marks to such candidates will affect the ranking of candidates like herself, who followed the instructions fully spending precious time.

When her mails failed to elicit any response from IIT Kanpur, she finally approached the Madras High Court, which admitted her plea on June 7.

The court while pronouncing its decision said that giving preference to candidates like the petitioner wouldn’t increase the total number of selected candidates, though their rankings may be altered.