Out of syllabus questions should not have been asked in CET: HC 

Karnataka High Court directs KEA to avoid out-of-syllabus questions in CET 2024, dismissing petition for rank recalculation.

Observing that questions outside the syllabus ought not to have been asked in the Common Entrance Test (CET) 2024 held in May for the selection of candidates for admission to various professional courses, the High Court of Karnataka has directed the authorities to ensure that such mistakes do not recur.

The Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) and the State government should take adequate measures to avoid such situations in future, the court said. Justice S. Sunil Dutt Yadav passed the order while disposing of a petition filed by 18-year-old Thanmay U. of Bengaluru, who personally argued his case before the court.

Mr. Thanmay had sought a directive to the KEA to compute his rank afresh for the engineering stream by considering the answers given by him for all the 180 questions, including the questions that were left out of evaluation for being outside the syllabus, in the subjects of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.

He pointed out that the decision to exclude 50 out-of-syllabus questions out of the total 240 questions, 60 questions each in four subjects, is substantial and had prejudiced the interest of many candidates, including the petitioner, who has spent time answering those 50 questions.

The petitioner had also sought a directive to the KEA to provide relatively higher marks to him, as he studied in CBSE while calculating the rank, considering the difficulty level of CBSE papers over Karnataka’s pre-university papers.

However, the court, on noticing that the decision to exclude 50 questions from the evaluation was taken based on the report of an expert committee as these questions were clearly outside the prescribed syllabus, said that the decision to leave out the questions was perfectly justifiable. Also, the court said it could not enter into the aspect of the validity of the decision taken by the government based on the views of the experts.

Meanwhile, Justice Yadav observed that it is “needless to state the apprehension of the petitioner, as also of other students, that such exclusion of questions has caused prejudice to them as the candidates would have adjusted the time depending on the questions that they are in a better position to answer, is an aspect that is to be taken note of appropriately in order to avoid such situations in future.”