On Monday, a petition has been filed in the Delhi High Court challenging the constitutional validity of the directions issued by BCI to all Law Universities in the country to conduct the final year law examinations through online mode or through any other appropriate method, and to conduct intermediate year law examinations after reopening of colleges.
In its 27th May Guidelines along with 9th June Press Release, the BCI has stated that the final year law students would be allowed to appear in online examinations, and the Universities would have the liberty to adopt an alternative strategy for conducting examinations for those students who are unable to avail the online examinations.
It mentions that for intermediate students, promotion will be on the basis of performance of previous years and marks obtained in internal examination of the current year while the Universities were directed to the conduct the end semester examination within a month of reopening of colleges.
The petitioner students have challenged the 27th June notification of University of Delhi in which it was stated that the new date sheets for all UG and PG programmes in Open Book Examination mode would be notified by the examination branch on 3th July, and the examination would begin from 10th July.
The petitioners highlighted that only 25% law students, at the maximum, have smart phones, computers and internet connection.
The plea mentioned the suicide of a 16-year-old student in Assam who was troubled due to being unable to participate in online classes and examinations as he didn’t have a smart phone.
The plea read in this regard:
“The basic submission is that any direction to hold examinations would be discriminatory and exclude the poorer 75% of the student population. The online trainings that are said to have happened, even assuming that they did take place, would not be freely accessible to the poor who have neither the device, nor the internet facilities to access these trainings”.
Stating the above, it was avertted in the plea that the online/internet mode education which was adopted as an alternative soon after the shutdown of the educational institutions was essentially limited to the rich and comfortable class of the society.
The petitioners fiurther submited that the alternative is to have no examinations and to take the average of the students’ grades/marks over the previous semesters and confer grades/marks on the basis of this average citing CBSE notification wherein similar steps were taken as an example.
“In the present case, it is suggested that the average performance of the students in the earlier years be taken to allow the students to graduate. This would obviate the need for having a system of examinations which would discriminatory on a large scale.”
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The petitioners were also critical of the online lectures delivered by the Universities have also been criticized in the petition.
“…the so-called lectures that were online were delivered haphazardly and partially, in that many of the lectures on account of COVID-19 were not delivered at all. The BCI may be called upon to produce the information as to what percentage of the lectures supposed to be done online were actually done.”
It brought to the Court’s notice the situation in Delhi University wherein the students have not been provided physical copies of case material. It mentioned the issues of the outstation students were stuck in their hometowns, with no access to their study material the lockdown had been announced during the University mid-semester break.
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Additionally, the petition put forward that many students did’ot have access to online classes due to lack of accessibility to laptops, internet, phones compatible with video-conferencing applications, a quiet space, printers or finances to avail hard copies of study material.
In regard to all this, the petitioners thus pleaded for the quashing of the 27th May BCI Guidelines, as well as the 9th June Press Release, as well as the quashing of the 27th June University of Delhi notification.
The pleas further sought an order directing an alternative system of evaluation to be formulated so as to do complete justice to the poorer section students and to exclude any possibility of discrimination and disadvantage.
