IIT Justifies Its Grace Marks Decision; 30,000 Seats Already Allotted

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has told the Supreme Court of India that it is not possible to implement changes in the merit list by scrapping the grace marks, reasoning that around 30,000 students have been allotted seats in the different engineering colleges across the country.

This is in response to the petition filed on last Friday (30th June 2017) questioning the premier IIT board’s decision to grant 7 additional grace marks to the students who did not even attempt the questions. IITs had earlier decided to give 18 additional grace marks to all the students for vague questions in the JEE-advanced exam held on 21st May 2017.

According to a report in TOI, replying to the Supreme Court, the IIT has justified its decision by saying that no aspirant was partially judged on the printing errors and the decision to award grace marks was taken by a committee of experts without any weakness.

IIT board filed an affidavit in the court saying, “The relief is entirely against equity since the process of seat allocation is going on and 29,425 candidates have already accepted the allotted seats and reported for document verification. It is submitted that in case the ongoing counselling and admission process is disturbed, the admission procedure of more than 36,000 students in 97 institutes under the joint seat allocation programme would be scrapped.”

The argument from plaintiff was that awarding grace marks to all the aspirants was against the fundamental rights and was violation of the court’s earlier order which said that grace marks could be given to only those candidates who attempted the question.

Out of 1.7 lakh candidates that were shortlisted for JEE-advanced, around 55,000 had qualified in the exam and are fighting for a seat in the 23 IITs and other government-aided engineering colleges like NIT and IIIT.

Rajguru Tandon

BW Reporters The author is a correspondent with BW Businessworld with keen interest in HR and employee welfare.