The Supreme Court will take up on Monday a batch of petitions seeking the cancellation of final-year exams for all universities and colleges in the country in view of the pandemic and declaration of results on the basis of internal assessment marks instead.

On June 26, the apex court had cleared the decks for the cancellation of the unfinished CBSE and ICSE board exams for Classes X and XII scheduled from July 1, allowing the respective boards to consider internal assessment marks as one of the criteria for the declaration of results.

The petitioners have essentially challenged the July 6 notification issued by the ministry of home affairs providing for the compulsory conduct of final-term examinations by universities and other institutions and the revised guidelines on examination and academic calendar for the varsities issued by the University Grants Commission (UGC) on the same day.

Some of the petitioners have cited the apex court order in the CBSE case to buttress the plea that similar relief should be given to college and university students as well.

The revised guidelines provided for the conduct of terminal/semester/final-year examination by the end of September in offline (pen and paper), online or blended mode following the prescribed protocols/guidelines issued with regard to Covid-19.

The petitioners included Yash Dubey, a final-year law student of Career College of Law, Barkatullah University, Bhopal, who through his advocate Raj Kamal sought to highlight the “grave and serious problems faced by thousands of students across the country” in view of the notification dated July 6.

The petition has urged the apex court to issue directions to the home ministry and the UGC to provide the following relief:

• Alternative mode of assessment of final-year students.
• A directive to the UGC to call upon the universities to submit a set of parameters for evaluation of students on the basis of past performance.
• Promotion of students on the basis of their performance in the previous semesters by taking an aggregate score for all the semesters and extrapolating them to calculate the marks as the basis for the final-semester results.