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Disha Panchal & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors. (with connected writ petitions)

Writ Petition (Civil) · 2018 INSC 553Decided 13 Jun 2018
Writ Petition (Civil) No. 551 of 2018
Justice Uday Umesh Lalit · Justice Deepak Gupta

Background

Thousands of candidates taking the 2018 Common Law Admission Test (CLAT), a single online entrance exam for 19 national law universities, experienced software crashes, frozen screens, login failures, and other technical glitches that cost many of them valuable exam time. Several candidates petitioned the Supreme Court (and various High Courts) seeking cancellation of the entire test and a fresh exam.

Decision Breakdown

The Court had already directed constitution of a Grievance Redressal Committee (headed by a retired judge) to audit login/logout data for all affected candidates. Based on that committee's report covering 4,690 affected candidates out of 54,464 total test-takers, the Court rejected the demand to cancel and re-conduct the entire exam as unfair to the large majority of unaffected candidates, and instead accepted a statistical "normalization formula" to award compensatory marks to candidates who lost time, based on each candidate's own answering efficiency. The Court also directed the Ministry of Human Resources Development to set up a committee to investigate the examination body's failures and prevent recurrence, and disposed of all the writ petitions with detailed implementation directions.

Lesson Learnt

When a technical failure disrupts a mass examination, courts will generally prefer a proportionate, data-driven remedy (like a scoring adjustment for affected candidates) over invalidating the entire process for everyone, since wholesale cancellation can cause greater unfairness to unaffected candidates.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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