Putting a full stop on all speculations on MAH CET 2015 retest or no retest, 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 some finding irregularities in the scoring pattern. Final verdict is expected today from the apex court of Maharashtra. As of now the petitioners do not propose to move the Supreme Court of India in case the final verdict goes against all their aspirations and they still hope that Bombay Court will deliver the verdict asking DTE to rectify the issue of faulty application of equi percentile.
Fate of 57224 MAH CET 2015 test takers lies in jeopardy and the candidates who appeared in slot 2 of day 1 will be the most benefitted in case Bombay High Court upholds the entire application of equi percentile process as applied by Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) Maharashtra in declaration of MAH CET 2015 result.
2 hour long hearing
Final hearing on April 28, 2015 at Bombay High Court took 2 hours where the candidates and DTE both made ample amount of arguments. Lawyers representing petitioners from Mumbai, Nagpur and Aurangabad and DTE Maharashtra were present in the court right from the beginning. Arguments started from the petitioner end presenting the awkward way in which DTE Maharashtra conducted MAH-MBA/MMS CET2015. Hon'ble Bench of Judges were of the opinion that in such exams one has to prepare to face unexpected situations. One cannot cry at these affairs as DTE has not deliberately done these things.
Lawyers representing petitioners cited instances presenting how percentile varied across the slots emphasising how slot 1 has been adversely affected due to wrong application of Equi-percentile method. Another point was raised on extra 212 students who, as per the attendance sheet declared by DTE Maharashtra were not there but figured in the final result. The total tally of students according to DTE Maharashtra was 57212 but the result of all candidates contains 57224 test takers. DTE has remained silent throughout on this issue. However, Hon'ble court did not find it appropriate to ask DTE from where these 212 candidates came. Lawyers representing the test takers cited different cases related to equi percentile where retest were allowed for example Rajasthan high court case about ICSE exam.
Other issues which affected the score of MAH CET 2015 test takers were also raised during hearing. There were arguments over how mass copying happened in exam, pathetic check in process, no partition between computers, server failure issues. Court heard all of it, but refrained from commenting on these problems.
DTE asked to compensate marks
Hon'ble Bench of Judges asked DTE to compensate marks which were not considered due to elimination of wrong questions. On this issue, the lawyer representing DTE came forward and explained how Marks were scaled to 200 and then final score was calculated.
Slot 1 Easy; so low percentile to high scorers
DTE lawyer stated that," Difficulty level for slot 1 was easy, slot 2 was difficult than slot 1 and that difficulty level of slot 4 was much higher than slot-1. Contradicting his own presentation of earlier arguments DTE Lawyer said that there were similar level of difficulty maintained across the slots and there were four different Question papers.
It is anybody’s guess that question papers may have different questions of same difficulty level but not entirely different question papers not conforming to the syllabus. Besides equi percentile process is applicable across the slots with same difficulty level. No candidate was allowed to choose the easier slot on his own. It should therefore not be contemplated 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.
In CAT13 discrepancy case- WP-1254-2014 Indore High court-, 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". DTE cannot claim that all 4 slots had totally different question papers.
DTE lawyer commented in the court that there is no alternative method to calculate percentile for these scores. Surprisingly, the Normalization method of GATE, BOX COX was ignored by DTE lawyer trying to make his way.
Court not in favour of MAH CET 2015 Re-Test
Hon'ble Judges were of the opinion that Until there were 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 test takers of slot 1 happy.
Petitions dismissed; verdict today
Hon'ble court heard all arguments on April 28, 2015 and said that case was dismissed. Verdict is proposed to be announced today on April 29, 2015. Petitioners hoping for redressal of their grievances remained at square one only. The decision was unprecedented as for almost an hour Hon'ble Bombay High Court appeared to agree upon the discrepancies occurred in the exam.
In case no corrective measures are taken by DTE now, the petitioners will be left with no alternative to approach the apex court of the country the Supreme Court of India.
The Problem in MAH CET 2015
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.
Candidates began demanding re-test of MAH CET 2015 or some fool-proof corrective measures. Not getting the same from DTE Maharashtra, these candidates filed PILs in Bombay High Court and its benches in Nagpur and Aurangabad. But after fighting for their cause they have not got any reprieve although final verdict is still awaited.
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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