Not finding itself well equipped with the expertise to intervene in the application of equi percentile process in declaration of MAH CET 2015 result, the Bombay High Court has although dismissed the petition of aggrieved MAH CET 2015 test takers, these candidates are far from satisfied with the verdict of the court and plan to invoke RTI and if need be, to move the apex court of the country on the issue of faulty application of equi percentile process in MAH CET 2015 result which pushed high scorer to lower percentile and low scorer to higher percentile.
Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) Maharashtra, the MAH CET 2015 exam conducting authority despite dismissal of the case on April 28, 2015 has not been able to announce the dates for Centralized Admission Process (CAP) 2015 as the DTE is in search of some corrective measures to redress grievances of the genuinely dissatisfied candidates.
Aggrieved candidates filed petitions in Bombay High Court demanding re-test of MAH CET 2015 or some fool-proof corrective measures. However honourable Bombay High Court has rejected their demand for retest as honourable judged did not find any valid malicious reasons proved in the case and until there is any unaccepted disastrous happening, they may not allow MAH CET 2015 retest, just to make the aggrieved test takers happy.
In fact courts don’t find themselves equipped enough to deal with such situation unless there is violation of law or some malafide is proved. Although the petition demanding retest of MAH CET 2015 was different from CAT13 discrepancy case- WP-1254-2014 Indore High court-, wherein IIM Indore responded that there are 60% or 18 of 30 questions in each question set are same but arranged randomly and 40% or 12 of 30 questions are different but difficulty level of those questions are almost equal" still all the PILs were rejected.
Candidates to invoke RTI
No doubt courts are not so well equipped to deal with the complicated academic matters but even the experts are of the view that it is not the equi percentile method itself but the faulty application of the same in MAH CET 2015 result, which has caused so much panic among the students. DTE Maharashtra in case does not take some corrective measures immediately, it may lose its charm for future also.
Aggrieved candidates now plan to invoke Right to Information (RTI) on MAH CET 2015 question papers and proceed with the re-evaluation process. In fact Difficulty level of question paper depends upon the individual competency. No one can comment upon the difficulty level across the slots as the same are taken care by calculating the formula containing Standard Deviation, mean of individual session including STDEV, Mean of all the slots.
All about the demand for Re-Test
MAH CET 2015 examination was conducted in multiple sessions on March 14 & 15, 2015. Apart from technical glitches all the 4 sessions of MAH CET 2015 had wrong questions which have not been evaluated by DTE Maharashtra. There was varying number of such questions qualifying for no evaluation in each session. According to DTE Maharashtra there were 59 questions in all which have not been evaluated. Due to this variation, DTE has normalized the score using Equi- percentile Method to take care of the difference in difficulty level, so that no candidate feels he/she is at a loss because he/she attempted a session which had tougher set of questions.
It gave rise to the problem when each session had a few questions not evaluated by DTE and it has also been placed in public domain, why not the marks scored after taking into account the not-evaluated answers qualified for same percentile. For example, if 19 questions in slot-1 and 18 questions in slot-2 were not evaluated, the marks were supposed to be awarded out of 181 and 182 respectively. The raw scores of the candidates then could have been converted to respective percentage in the session and then converted to percentile depending upon the common process of percentile calculation.
But the methodology adopted by DTE caused panic and dissatisfaction among the MAH CET 2015 takers after declaration of result on March 25, 2015. A high percentiler in MAH CET 2015 has scored very low percentile due to faulty process of equi-percentile application.
Since the equi-percentile process is adopted for the exam conducted in multiple sessions but with similar level of difficulty. It can be understood by the process of awarding percentile scores in Common Admission Test (CAT). According to Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) Maharashtra the candidates who appeared in slot-1 of the MAH CET 2015 exam had an easy test and therefore their percentile scores were reduced by taking the slot-2 test as base.
Ironically no candidate was allowed to choose the easier slot on his own. In view of the aggrieved candidates why it should be assumed by DTE Maharashtra that it awarded low percentile to higher scorers who happened to get easy question paper and higher percentile to low scorers who got a difficult set of questions. There is no parameter to judge that a candidate who scored high in an easy test wouldn’t score high in difficult test, nor it can be said that a low scorer of a particular slot with difficult questions would score high in easier set of questions. Besides the easy or difficult questions is a subjective approach and depends on the level of preparation. No candidate with a reasonably high score would have gone to the examination hall unprepared or expecting easy test paper.
Bombay High Court on April 28, 2015 after hearing petitioners and DTE patiently for 2 hours dismissed the demand for MAH CET 2015 retest despite finding irregularities in the scoring pattern.
Bombay High Court has upheld the application of equi percentile process as applied by Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) Maharashtra in declaration of MAH CET 2015 result.
Fate of 57224 MAH CET 2015 test takers lies in jeopardy and the candidates who appeared in slot 2 of day 1 are the most benefitted while those who appeared in slot 1 are most adversely affected after the announcement of Bombay High Court verdict.
To help out MAH CET 2015 candidates, MBAUniverse.com has started unique initiative to provide LIVE MAH CET 2015 Results update, news, Cut-offs, Expert guidance, DTE Admission Counselling and GD PI Updates for Admission 2015.
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