The Supreme Court on Friday put a temporary halt on the counselling and admission process of students who had given their IIT-JEE Advanced exams on May 21.
This decision was taken while hearing a petition regarding awarding of grace marks to students for misprinted questions.
“It is a problem and it has to be solved by us at the earliest,” the SC said.
The SC further directed all High Courts in the country not to entertain pleas over the matter.
The petitioners had approached the top court after all the students, even those who gave the exams in English, were awarded grace marks for the ‘misprinted’ questions, although the misprints had appeared only in Hindi medium question papers.
The Joint Admission Board had earlier told the apex court on Thursday that it was “not possible” to prepare a revised merit list saying that more than 30,000 candidates were already granted seats in different engineering colleges across the country.
On June 30, the country’s apex court had sought a reply as to why all the students were awarded bonus marks, irrespective of whether the students had attempted the ‘misprinted’ questions or not.
It was announced on June 4 that all students would be given 11 bonus marks for three ‘ambiguous’ questions after an internal review. Out of these three, two were from the Maths section and one was from the Physics section, an internal review by experts found.
According to reports, awarding of bonus/ grace marks for wrong questions in IITs is not new, as even in 2015 and 2016, students were awarded bonus marks for one question and three questions respectively.
This year, among the 50,455 candidates who cleared the exams, 10,638 were shortlisted for the preparatory list, a TOI report said on the day the results were declared.
