DELHI HIGH COURT on Thursday sent notices to the National Testing Agency (NTA) and JEE (Advanced) officials after a writ petition was moved by Shashank Shekhar Pandey, a candidate in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main 2025, alleging systemic failures and mismatches in the assessment of his performance in the examination.*. The Court, while considering the case, issued interim orders permitting Pandey to be registered for the JEE (Advanced), pending the result of the present judicial proceedings.
The case came up for hearing before Justice Vikas Mahajan, who underscored the seriousness of the allegations made by the petitioner, particularly in light of the fact that this attempt at JEE (Main) was his last available chance to make it to top engineering colleges in India. The DELHI HIGH COURT ordered Pandey’s JEE (Advanced) results not to be announced for the time being and instead to be placed before the bench in a sealed cover for confidential examination.
“The findings of the petitioner will not be pronounced and will be presented to the Court in a sealed envelope. It is further made clear that all interim orders are tentative and subject to final adjudication of this case,” the Court held.
The case has now been posted for further hearing on July 25, when the Court will go through the audit logs, response records, and formal evaluation protocols to decide if there were technical or procedural failures.
Based on the plea, Pandey argued that he had tried 46 questions in JEE (Main) 2025 session but when the response sheet was declared by the National Testing Agency, it reflected just 29 questions attempted, with an inexplicable mismatch. His lawyer, Advocate Shivam Pandey, pointed out that the discrepancies had a direct effect on the petitioner’s eligibility and merit ranking, and thus denied him a fair opportunity to move further to JEE (Advanced).
DELHI HIGH COURT was apprised by the lawyer that the disparity had left the petitioner with no realistic recourse, as this was his last allowable opportunity to take the JEE. “He studied for four years, got 90 percentile last year, and now for technical misreporting, he is being unjustly denied his rightful chance,” said the lawyer.
The Bench was also apprised that the registration deadline for JEE (Advanced) was near, giving urgency to the issue. Representatives of the petitioner urged that to deny him registration, on account of a possibly defective response sheet, would be an irreversible prejudice.
What particular evidence will the DELHI HIGH COURT evaluate in deciding if NTA’s assessment process was tainted in JEE Main 2025?
To determine the issue, DELHI HIGH COURT indicated that it would have to analyze the digital audit logs created during the exam. These would comprise the timestamp and metadata relating to the candidate’s activity while taking the computer-based test, along with the data points captured by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which operates the backend infrastructure of the NTA’s online examination process.
The NTA itself ruled out human error or tampering. Its lawyer claimed in the Court that the whole system is automated and tamper-resistant, being operated by the NIC alone without manual intervention. “There is no human interface for uploading or processing response sheets. The process is electronic and is completely dependent upon secure backend procedures,” the representative of the NTA stated.
In spite of the claims of technical perfection by the agency, DELHI HIGH COURT stated that a thorough audit of the records and procedural checks is necessary to maintain the integrity of public examinations and to ensure that no deserving candidate is prejudiced by system flaws.
Justice Mahajan noted that although the NTA’s dependence on NIC may curtail human intervention, it never eliminates the risk of data recording errors, transmission delays, or software-level defects. The Court feared that in the absence of judicial examination of the logs and back-end systems, such controversies would go unresolved and dent public trust in high-stakes competitive exams.
Also present in court were Advocates Priyanshu Upadhyay, Shruti Pandey, and Abhinav Sharma, who advocated for the petitioner’s plea to conduct a transparent investigation and interim access to JEE (Advanced), subject to ultimate resolution.
The DELHI HIGH COURT emphasized that the sanctity of the exam results has to be maintained, and any bonafide complaint about the assessment process needs to be settled speedily and transparently. The judge also repeated that interim relief does not create merit in the case but ensures that harm of an irremediable kind does not ensue prior to a complete hearing being held.
The judicial challenge arrives on the heels of the NTA already facing intensified scrutiny following earlier controversies, including identical complaints about score differences and exam malfunctions. These serial problems have been met with calls from all quarters for increased accountability and regulation of national-level entrance tests.
In permitting the candidate to register for JEE (Advanced) while maintaining his results under judicial seal, the DELHI HIGH COURT has achieved a judicious balance between safeguarding institutional processes and securing individual rights.
As the case unfolds, stakeholders in both the education and legal communities will be observing intently for precedent-setting observations regarding how India’s judiciary understands and applies transparency to digital-age examination systems.
ALSO READ
JEE Mains 2025 Shock: 9 Flaws, Thousands Affected
CLAT 2025: Delhi High Court Orders Revised UG Results