Case Law Details
The writ petition was filed by the appellant who is a student of respondent No.1 – Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. He gave the Final Examination of the respondents in November, 2013. He did not He thereafter applied for Suggestive Answers, Re-evaluation of the marks and Certified copy of his answer sheet.
It is the contention of the appellant that when he got the copy of the answer sheet, he found that the examiner had not properly checked the papers. It is also his contention that despite the appellant having written correct answers to the questions which also tally with the suggestive answer sheet, the appellant was awarded less marks for the various answers. It is the further contention of the appellant that some of the papers were checked in a completely incorrect manner and some of them were checked in a partially incorrect manner.
The stress in the petition is that the appellant gave right answers which tally with the suggestive answers and yet the appellant had not qualified. Reliance was also placed on Regulation 39(7) of the Chartered Accountants Regulations, 1988 which gives powers to the respondents to take necessary steps if the result of an examination has been affected by error, malpractice, fraud, improper conduct etc. The appellant hence prayed for a direction to the respondents to constitute a Board for rechecking the papers of the appellant submitted during the Final Examination in November, 2013.
The learned Single Judge by the impugned order dismissed the writ petition relying upon the judgments of the Supreme Court in the case of Himachal Pradesh Service Commission v. Mukesh Thakur, (2010) 6 SCC 759 and Pramod Kumar Srivastava v. Chairman, Bihar Public Service Commission, Patna & Ors., AIR 2004 SC 4116 holding that in the absence of any provisions for re-evaluation, no re-evaluation of the answer books can be carried out and directions to that effect cannot be issued by the court.
The main contention of the learned counsel for the appellant is that the answers given by him in the answer sheets tally with the suggestive answers and hence there is a patent error in the evaluation of his answer The response of the respondents is stated in a letter dated 16.05.20 14 written in reply to a representation of the appellant dated 18.04.2014. Relevant portion of the same reads as follows:
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Miscarriage of justice is always inbuilt any system of examination. Hence , while one can sympathise with the student , one has to applaud with approval the decision taken by the courts as in such cases remedy will be worse than maldy as it would invite lakhs of students grieving their results on some ground or the other . Having said that , I deplore the laxity shown by the examiner and the moderator and seriously resist the Institute to devise a robust system of checks and balances to avoid recurrences of events like this .