All-pass in arrear exams: HC asks univs to explain status
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Chennai:12.01.2021
The Madras high court on Monday directed the universities in the state to file a report on the status of conducting arrear exams either through offline or online mode along with the schedule in three weeks.
The first bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy passed the interim order on a batch of pleas challenging the decision of the Tamil Nadu government to cancel the arrear exams.
On December 1, 2020 the court restrained the state universities from declaring all-pass in arrear exams without conducting exams either online or offline.
It was also made clear that the universities are free to conduct arrear exams despite a GO passed by the state cancelling the exams. The exams could be conducted either online or offline or a combination of both.
The orders were passed on the pleas moved by former Anna University Vice-chancellor E Balagurusamy, advocate Ramkumar Adityan and others challenging the GO cancelling arrear exams.
Responding to the pleas, UGC clarified that students who have not cleared the backlogs would not be eligible even to get a course completion certificate.
However, justifying its decision, the state government submitted that the decision was made only to alleviate distresses faced by the student community due to Covid-19. It was done to skilfully navigate the course to ensure safety and wellbeing of the students, the state department of higher education said in its affidavit.
Rejecting the argument that such an order would amount to discrimination among students, the department said, “the decision would not demoralise meritorious students as only moderated minimum pass mark is awarded to arrear students.”
“As this situation was unprecedented, students had left their belongings, textbooks, notebooks and laptops in their hostel. Therefore, they had no access to their study materials,” the department added.
No comments:
Post a Comment