The Delhi High Court recently dismissed a plea challenging the 'normalization' procedure adopted in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains exam.

Normalization, administered by the National Testing Agency (NTA), involves comparing a candidate's scores across question papers from various exam sessions. This ensures that students are neither disadvantaged nor advantaged by the varying difficulty levels of different exam sessions.

On February 27, in a ruling issued, Justice C Hari Shankar dismissed at the threshold the plea filed by Setu Vinit Goenka against the normalisation procedure.

The Court highlighted that normalisation serves to mitigate the potential inequality stemming from the inevitable variation in difficulty levels among different exam papers.

The single-judge emphasized the importance of judicial prudence, noting that courts should exercise caution, particularly when considering issuing notices in cases involving a large number of students, such as the present one.

Petitioner Setu Vinit Goenka approached the High Court, contending that the normalisation process is unjust and unfair to students. He argued that the normalisation factor used by the NTA is undisclosed, leading to opacity and potential arbitrariness. Furthermore, he asserted that normalisation shouldn't serve as a basis for evaluating students' performance since they all take the same exam but are assigned different shifts randomly by the NTA.

During the proceedings, it was brought to the Court's attention that there exists a variance between the raw scores obtained by candidates and the percentile scores they receive post-normalisation. The NTA contested the plea, arguing that with 12 lakh candidates appearing for the JEE exam, ensuring complete transparency necessitates the allocation of different question papers to candidates nationwide. The NTA further argued that normalisation based on percentiles is a comprehensive statistical process widely adopted globally.

The Court after considering the rival submissions concluded that the plea was speculative in nature and rejected the same.

Advocate Arun Sharma appeared for petitioner Setu Vinit Goenka.

Advocates Apoorv Kurup, Nidhi Mittal, Gauri Gobardhan, Akhil Hasija and Muskaan Gupta appeared for the NTA.

Advocates Shiva Lakshmi and Archana Kumari represented the Union of India.