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Synopsis

A Supreme Court Bench of Justice Ajay Rastogi and Justice C.T. Ravikumar, dismissed St. Stephen's plea seeking an interim relief against the Delhi High Court's judgment on the admission policy, on Wednesday. The matter will be heard next year.

The College is now to follow Delhi University's admission policy for Undergraduate courses, for students belonging to general category. And further it is to consider only the CUET scores. The subject under scrutiny was an additional policy of interviews for the students to seek admission in St. Stephen's college.

The Delhi High Court earlier had ordered St. Stephen's College to follow the admission policies formed by Delhi University, for the academic year 2022-2023. Further had directed the College to withdraw its Admission Prospectus, and accordingly, issue a Public Notice announcing the revised admission procedure.

Noting that the CUET has been implemented by DU to level the playing field, and remove aberrations that have arisen due to the varying standards of evaluation of different State Boards, a division bench of Chief Justice, Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad, opined, that conducting an interview over and over again is unethical.

The division bench also ruled that, while the College retains the authority to conduct interviews in addition to the CUET for the admission of students from the minority community, it cannot devise a policy that requires students from the non-minority community to do so as well. As a result, the College's right to conduct interviews and give them 15% weightage in the admissions process does not extend to non-minority students, but only to minority students. Therefore, the bench had directed St Stephens College to issue a new prospectus giving 100% weightage to the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) score for admission to its undergraduate courses under the non-minority category.

Case Title: St. Stephen's College vs. University of Delhi and Anr.