Prateek Tanmay
The Kerala High Court on Thursday came to the aid of three CBSE class 12 students, one of them from the UAE, by allowing them to upload their reevaluated marks on the KEAM portal, but said that their admission based on the recast rank list shall be considered from the second allotment round.
The students had moved the court, claiming that if their revalued marks were taken into reckoning, their rank would have improved tremendously. They said that their revalued marks were published by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) only after the Kerala Engineering Architecture Medical (KEAM) rank list was published on June 27.
The three students had alleged in their respective petitions that they had been deprived of their eligible rank in KEAM 2026 due to the irregularity in valuation by CBSE and the delay in publishing their revalued results.
Though the students had uploaded the marks they got initially, they had applied for reevaluation due to the widespread allegations of errors in the valuation of CBSE examination answer sheets for this year.
The state government, on the other hand, opposed the pleas, claiming that it had already changed the date of publication of the rank list twice to accommodate CBSE students, and the last date for them to upload their revalued marks was June 23.
It said that the final rank list was published on June 27, and it should not be revisited for any person or persons.
The government also contended that the allotment process started on July 8 and “any interference with the rank list will bring the admission process into complete disarray”.
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Disagreeing with the government, the High Court said the situation in the instant writ petitions was “undoubtedly exceptional” and “exceptional circumstances warrant exceptional measures”.
The court observed that the valuation of the CBSE Board answer sheets had numerous flaws and the initial valuation conducted by it “contained several technical glitches, including swapped answer sheets, blurry scanned pages due to a newly launched digital scanning system etc. and the discrepancies in valuation were not attributable to the candidates”.
It further noted that though the majority of the revaluations were done on time, the petitioners fell into a category whose revalued results were published only after the rank list was published — “again for no fault of theirs”.
“They have also approached this court without any delay. Though the process of admissions is a laborious task for the authorities, that per se cannot be a ground for compromising merit, especially when a candidate of higher merit has approached this court without undue delay,” the High Court said.
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It said that the petitioners should be granted the relief, but since the allotment process has already started, the relief should be given in a manner that does not affect the ongoing process.
The High Court directed the Commissioner of Entrance Examinations, Kerala, to accept the revalued mark list of the three petitioners, if uploaded by 12.30 pm on July 13 and recast the rank list based on their revalued marks before the second allotment commences.
“Under no circumstances shall the revalued marks of any other person be permitted to be uploaded,” it said.
“The candidature of the petitioners for admission based on the ranks so granted to them, after recasting the rank list, shall be considered only from the next allotment onwards, and they shall not be entitled to claim any benefit in the first allotment,” the court said.
