IIT-JEE Mains : Supreme Court To Hear TODAY Plea Seeking Additional Attempt Due To Technical Glitches In First & Second Sessions

The petitions put forth the grievance of the candidates who had appeared in these sessions and were faced with technical glitches, which they claimed, had adversely affected their performance. The issues faced by the candidates as elucidated in the petitions are as under -

1. 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 submit that even though numerous representations have been made to NTA since June 2022, there is no response to the same. 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 that only on 08.07.2022, the discrepancies were noted by the NTA. Thereafter, on 18.07.2022, a few petitioners had approached 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 aver that granting permission to re-attempt is ipso facto an admission that technical glitches had indeed marred the first session that took place in June 2022. The petitions further assail the arbitrary manner in which opportunity was given to a selected few by NTA to retake the examination.

The second session which was held in July, 2022 had also suffered the same fate. Accordingly, representations were made to NTA. The results of the second session were released with the final ranking list and there seems to be discrepancies in the final scores. The answers marked by the candidates are not matching with the final answer sheet.

The petitions take 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.

Cases : S Hymavathi and others versus National Testing Agency and another, Ishika Sharad Gajbhiye and others versus National Testing Agency and others, Shristi Srivastava versus National Testing Agency and others, Nimesh Kumar versus Union of India