MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court has upheld the cancellation of a student’s provisional admission to an engineering course at a private university in Pune after the Maharashtra Common Entrance Test (CET) Cell found that the CET scorecards submitted by him showed substantially higher percentiles than his actual scores.
During the admission process, the university detected discrepancies between the scorecard submitted by the student and its records. Taking note of the discrepancies, the court directed the state CET Cell to examine its records. A bench comprising justices Farhan P Dubash and RI Chagla dismissed the student’s petition and upheld the cancellation of his admission. The case comes amid concerns raised separately by MLA and NCP (SP) leader Rohit Pawar over an alleged leak of confidential student data from the CET Cell.
The student had secured provisional admission on June 23 to the four-year B.Tech Renewable Energy Engineering course for the 2026-30 academic year. It informed him on July 10 that his provisional admission would be cancelled and formally cancelled the admission through an email on July 14. The student approached the High Court on July 17, claiming that he had downloaded the scorecard from the official CET website and had not altered it. The CET Cell subsequently submitted a supplementary report to the court on August 4, along with the original records pertaining to the student’s two CET attempts. The CET Cell records showed that the student had secured an overall percentile of 7.8474707 in his first attempt and 13.5482364 in his second attempt. However, the scorecards submitted by him showed significantly higher percentiles of 78.874707 and 73.5482364, respectively. Pawar recently met the commissioner of the CET Cell and raised concerns over what he described as the leakage of confidential data belonging to more than 450,000 students.
The CET Cell told the court that the scorecards submitted by the student had not been generated by the department and had either been altered or were fake. After examining the records, the court said it found no reason to doubt the findings of the CET Cell. The bench said competition for professional courses could be extremely high and that the disappointment of a student who receives low marks or a low percentile could be understood. However, such disappointment could not justify resorting to unauthorised or unfair means to secure admission, it said.
