Kochi | The Kerala High Court on Thursday upheld the decision of the single judge of the same court, striking down a last-minute change made by the state government to the KEAM 2025 entrance exam prospectus.
A division bench of Justices Anil K Narendran and Muralee Krishna S said that it finds "absolutely no reason to interfere with the decision of the single judge".
With the observation, it dismissed the state government's appeal against the single judge's July 9 order.
Later in the day, state Higher Education Minister R Bindu said that the High Court directed publication of a fresh rank list based on the earlier unchanged formula and the same will be done by Thursday night itself.
The minister said that the government was not planning on appealing against the High Court order in the Supreme Court as it would further delay the admission process, which in turn would adversely affect the candidates' futures.
She said that the earlier formula was "unjust" and that is why it was changed.
The minister also said that the KEAM prospectus contained a clause permitting the government to make changes in it at any time.
The High Court, however, was of the view that the last minute change was not correct.
It said that a report of the standardisation review committee, appointed by the government to look into the older formula for deciding ranking, had concluded that implementing a new criteria by this year "was not feasible".
The bench also noted that a reading of the committee's report would reveal that it "would not in any manner support the decision now taken by the government for adopting an entirely new standardisation method".
Meanwhile, Leader of Opposition in the state assembly, V D Satheesan, questioned whether anyone with "common sense" would make such last minute changes.
"The Entrance Exam Commissionerate and the Higher Education Department are doing things without thinking and are putting children's futures at risk. On the other hand, CPI state secretary Binoy Viswom said that the government was attempting to help the Kerala state syllabus students, which was "justified".
"But the technical problems in implementing it have to be overcome," he said.
The single judge's July 9 order striking down the government's decision as "illegal, arbitrary, and unjustified", came on a petition filed by a group of CBSE students who sat for the KEAM (Kerala Engineering, Architecture, and Medical Entrance Examination).
The students argued that the change, issued on July 1--just an hour before the rank list was published--altered the method for calculating final scores of candidates.
Justice D K Singh had observed that the timing of the decision appeared suspicious.
The single judge had ordered that the rank list be reissued using the original formula specified in the February 19 prospectus.
"We are confirming the order of the single judge," the division bench said on Thursday, and said that the detailed order would be available in a couple of days.
