SC rejects plea seeking review of its order on CBSE Class 12 exams amid pandemic

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has dismissed a plea seeking reconsideration of its June 22 order refusing to interfere with the CBSE assessment scheme for conducting offline exam of Class 12 students of private, ‘patrachar’ and second compartment amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The plea was seeking review of the scheme as per which the offline exams would be conducted from August 15 to September 15 this year.

“The present review petition has been filed against the final judgment and order dated June 22, 2021. We have perused the review petition as well as the grounds in support thereof. In our opinion, no case for review is made out. The review petition is accordingly dismissed,” a bench of Justices A M Khanwilkar and Dinesh Maheshwari said in its order passed on Wednesday.

In its June 22 order, the apex court had refused to interfere with the assessment scheme propounded by both the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) for evaluation of class 12 students, whose board examinations have been cancelled due to the pandemic.

The court had approved the CBSE's scheme to take offline examination of students of private, ‘patrachar’ and second compartment as their evaluation under the scheme based on internal assessment of their results in Class 10, 11 and 12 respectively cannot be undertaken. The top court had rejected the objections raised by a parents’ body as well as students and said that it is not possible to have a second guess approach with regard to various aspects of the assessment scheme.

“We hold that there is no reason to interfere with the scheme propounded by the CBSE or ICSE. Notably, there is other set of students represented by different counsel who have unreservedly supported the Schemes under consideration and do not want any interference therewith,” the bench had said.

The Centre had earlier told the court that the CBSE will be adopting 30:30:40 formula to evaluate Class 12 students based on the results of Class-10, 11 and 12 examinations respectively. The CISCE had also informed the court that it will declare the Class 12 results by July 20, after evaluating the students based on its well defined objective criteria. The components adopted by CISCE for arriving at the evaluation formula is --marks percentage in Class 10 board examinations, the Project and Practical Work in the subjects, the performance of the candidates in the school examinations in the subjects in Classes 11 and 12, measured through their best marks obtained in the two years (referred to as raw marks) and the best performance of the school in the last six years.

It had said that assessment of students would be done based on their marks obtained in Class X examination, performance in school examinations in Class 11 and 12 along with practical and performance of school in the last six years. The CISCE had said that among the factors used in the computation include best year for school-from among the years 2015-2020, the best year for a school is the year when the school achieved the best average percentage in terms of the total scores (out of 500).

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