Karnataka High Court will be hearing a plea challenging the conduct of the COMEDK examination amid the COVID-19 pandemic today, reports Times of India. The exam is scheduled to be conducted on August 19 and the admit card for the exam has already been issued.
Further Read: SC adjourns the matter for August 18
Supreme Court, meanwhile, is all set to hear a petition against the UGC guidelines for universities for the conduct of final year exam tomorrow. The plea had challenged the UGC insistence on conducting the final year exams in all universities. The Centre is supposed to file a reply on the question whether states can issue guidelines contradicting the UGC based on disaster management authority.
With regard to the COMEDK exam, TOI reports that the petition filed for COMEDK exam says that there is no urgency to conduct the exam now as other national level entrance exams like JEE Main, NEET, AIBE, and CLAT are scheduled to be conducted in the month of September.
Students have flooded the social media with requests for cancellation or postponement of COMEDK, JEE Main, NEET 2020, university final year exams due to the COVID-19 situation in the country.
For university final year exam, UGC has insisted that final year exams are an important part of academic process and states cannot cancel the university exams. States have argued that they have the right to make decisions based on disaster management authority.
One of the petitions for the cancellation of the university exam has been filed by a group of 31 students from different states and universities. A separate petition has been filed Yuva Sena led by Aditya Thackeray, Yash Dubey, and others, adds the report.
Several states including Maharashtra, Delhi, Odisha, Punjab and Haryana have cancelled the university exams and have decided to grade the students based on past performance and internal assessment.
Another plea for the cancellation of JEE Main and NEET is also scheduled to be heard in the Supreme Court in the near future. The plea said the government’s decisions to conduct the exam was “utterly arbitrary, whimsical and violative of the students’ fundamental right to life”.
However, a group of parents have moved to the Supreme Court demanding that the JEE Main and NEET exams should be conducted in the month of September and should not be postponed any further. The plea argued that any further postponement will adversely affect the career of the students.
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