High court stays MBA/MMS admissions in Maharashtra

NAGPUR: In some respite to MBA aspirants demanding re-examination of ‘MAH-MBA/MMS CET 2015’ for glaring errors, the Bombay High Court recently granted stay on MBA/MMS admissions in Maharashtra. It has also directed State Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) not to commence the centralized admissions process (CAP) until further orders, before adjourning the hearing till Monday.
Director of technical education Subhash Mahajan told TOI that as per the court’s directives they were not going ahead with the admission process. “Anyhow, our CAP rounds were slated to commence from June and we’ve informed this to the court,” he said.
Joint director for technical education in Nagpur Gulab Thakre added that they had received a communication from their head office in Mumbai to immediately stop all admissions to the management courses held through DTE. “Accordingly, we’ve issued notification and even informed all colleges not to grant admissions under institutional or management quota till the court vacates stay,” he said.
A bunch of petitions were filed by the students at principal bench in Mumbai and benches at Nagpur and Aurangabad after several blunders, including wrong questions, were detected during ‘MAH-MBA/MMS CET 2015’ conducted on March 14 and 15. Over 60,000 aspirants appeared for the online exam in four slots. In each of the slots, several questions were wrong. Some students, including Rajyashree Borkar from the city, complained against the equi-percentile calculation process of DTE.
She scored 121 marks with 95.728 percentile when the results were declared on March 26. She later noticed that many of her friends scored similar marks, but there was huge variation in percentile score that prompted her to knock the judiciary’s doors through counsel Alok Daga.
Earlier, DTE told the court that it was ready to grant marks for wrong questions but refused to conduct re-examination. On the contrary, it justified the exam system and new method to award marks through percentile. It also assured that it wouldn’t act against the petitioners for approaching the court.
In Mumbai, the plea was filed by Akanksha Paranjpe and others who challenged the arbitrary manner in which ‘MAH-MBA/MMS CET 2015’ was conducted. They contended that the exam led to an arbitrary situation where students were wrongly tested for their ability or inability to deal with admittedly wrong questions.
Thakre informed that there are about 5,500 MBA seats under Nagpur division in 60 colleges spread over six districts.