The Supreme Court on Friday, will hear the pleas seeking directions to the National Testing Agency (NTA) for conducting additional sessions of IIT-JEE Mains Examination 2022 for both the first and the second sessions which were disrupted owing to some technical glitches.
A bench by Justices DY Chandrachud, AS Bopanna and JB Pardiwala will hear all four petitions raising this issue.
The petitions have been put by the candidates who had appeared in these sessions and were faced with technical glitches. The students claimed that the glitches affected their overall performance.The students faced five major problems:
1. The questions of the examination did not appear on the screen at the start, and were intermittently disappearing and re-appearing.
2. The options to move to the next question, etc. stopped working intermittently.
3. Blank screens or frozen screens and software crashes.
4. Invigilators were unable to help resolve glitches and new issues cropped up thereafter.
5.Discrepancy in final score when compared to options marked
The petitions added that although the students have submitted number of representations since Jube 2022, they have received no response. They added that the testing agency has not come up with a public notice informing the applicants that the JEE Mains 1st session would be conducted again.
It appears on 08.07.2022, that the NTA noted the discrepancies, after which on 18.07.2022, a few petitioners rapproached the Apex Court complaining about the technical glitches and on 29.07.2022 relief was granted to only the petitioners in the said matter. On 28.07.2022, the NTA apprised some selected candidates via e-mail that they would be allowed to appear for an additional session to be conducted on 30.07.2022.
The petitions argues that giving permission to re-attempt is ipso facto an admission that technical glitches had indeed marred the first session of the exam. The petitions further states that which opportunity is given to a selected few by NTA to retake the examination.
The second session which was held in July, 2022 also had similar issues. Representations was made to NTA. Now, as the results of the second session are relelased with the final ranking list there is a lot of discrepancies in the final scores. The answers marked by the candidates are not matching with the final answer sheet.
The petitions takes note of the fact that with respect to UGC-NET Examination when NTA came to know that it was faced with technical issues due to installation of security patches to safeguard the exam mechanism, they had re-notified the said examination. The JEE Mains candidates were not issued any such notice.
The petitions have been filed through Advocates Sumanth Nookala, Vanshaja Shukla and Shashank Singh.