HC rejects plea of students against MBA CET process

The petitioners – 154 MBA aspirants – were aggrieved about the CET Cell’s process for normalisation of scores and claimed that the process had led to lesser scores and as the cell had not adopted a standard procedure for all the batches that appeared for the retest, therefore, the MBA CET should be conducted again for all aspirants

Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Tuesday rejected a petition which challenged the outcome of the MBA CET retest conducted in May and said, “The complaints of structural failures or discrepancies in the normalisation of score process were brought about only after results were declared. We are wholly unable to see any substance in the petition.”

HT Image

The petitioners – 154 MBA aspirants – were aggrieved about the CET Cell’s process for normalisation of scores and claimed that the process had led to lesser scores and as the cell had not adopted a standard procedure for all the batches that appeared for the retest, therefore, the MBA CET should be conducted again for all aspirants.

The HC, however, held that as mathematical precision in such cases (normalisation method) was not possible and as the petitioners before it constituted less than a per cent of the aspirants, it was not inclined to accede to the demand to have the MBA CET conducted all over again.

The division bench of justice Gautam Patel and justice Neela Gokhale while hearing the petition through advocates Satish Talekar and Madhavi Ayyappan had concluded the hearing on Monday and dictated the order in the court on Tuesday.

The petitioners had claimed that after they had faced problems in the entrance test, which was originally conducted in March, the CET cell had conducted the test in May, where 11,562 aspirants had appeared, but as the process for calculating scores was not proper, they had sought to re-conduct the test for all aspirants.

The advocates had informed the bench that as the normalisation of the marks process was not informed to the aspirants before the results were declared in June, they had approached the HC disputing the scores that they secured.

When advocate general Birendra Saraf for the Cell argued that if the aspirants had a problem with the normalisation process, they should have approached the HC before the results were declared. The petition indicated that the petitioners wanted to undo the outcome of the retest which was done at their behest.

While nearly 1.12 lakh aspirants had appeared for the original test, due to technical problems some of the test takers had got additional time to write the test. After some aspirants complained to the HC, the Cell had asked nearly 10,000 aspirants to take the retest and gave the option to appear for the retest to the aggrieved aspirants.

Talekar had countered that as the normalisation process document was issued only after the results were declared they could not have approached the HC before that. He further said that the normalisation of scores across the five batches (four during the original test and one retest batch) was not accurate as the number of candidates in each batch differed. Thus, the test takers from the last batch had secured lower ranks.

In its order, the bench stated, “Nothing shown to us to indicate the normalisation method adopted is unfair. This is especially so when the normalisation process has not been applied selectively to one batch but applied across the board to all batches.”

Referring to the prayer for reconducting the test for all aspirants, the bench held, “No thought is spared to hundreds of thousands of others who gave the exam. They do not represent all candidates, yet we are expected that all those persons suffer at the instance of present disgruntled persons without being given the slightest opportunity of being heard.”

Holding that the complaints of structural failures or discrepancies in the normalisation of the process were brought to the fore only after results were declared, the bench said, “We are wholly unable to see any substance in the petition. We reject it on facts and substance. As petitioners are students, we refrain from making orders of costs.”