The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a plea seeking cancellation of offline exams for Class 10 and 12 to be conducted by all state boards, CBSE, ICSE and National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS). Rejecting the appeal, the bench headed by Justice A M Khanwilkar observed that such petition creates "false hope" and "confusion" all over.

"This creates not only false hopes, it creates confusion all over to students who are preparing," said the bench, also comprising Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and C T Ravikumar.

"Let the students do their job and let the authorities do their jobs," the bench observed.

The plea, filed by Anubha Shrivastava Sahai, an advocate and child rights activist, along with the Student Union of Odisha-NYCS,  had sought directions to the CBSE and other education boards, which have proposed to hold board examinations for classes 10 and 12 in offline mode, to devise alternate modes of assessment.

Shrivastava Sahai expressed displeasure over the verdict passed by the Supreme Court and said that due to this verdict "these students, too, will suffer like students of last two years batches."

While the petitioners had hoped that the Supreme Court would rule in their favour, students say they had very little to no hope. "I had no hope that Supreme Court would understand our plight, so I had not stopped preparing for the board exams," Badshah Khan, a class 12 student from Sundargarh, Odisha told indianexpress.com. "But the problem that nobody has understood till now is that we have not even been taught properly. A lot of times our teachers didn't even have answers to our academic queries. Either there were no classes happening, or if they did schedule classes, the teachers were almost as clueless as us."

Another class 12 student from Bihar had similar complaints. "Covid is almost gone, so I had no hope that Supreme Court would rule in our favour," Abhishek Kumar Jha told indianexpress.com. "We will have to double our efforts and hope for the best in these two months now. In Bihar, classes were being scheduled but nothing was being taught in them. So, I relied on coaching classes and tutors, instead of schools."

A class 10 student from Delhi, on the other hand, said she had hoped that Supreme Court would "manage to identify the sufferings of school students" and cancel board exams as "afterall, the people working in such institutions are some of the brightest and most reputed people of our country". However, she says she is "disappointed that nobody is paying attention to the problems being faced by the future leaders and scholars of this country".

The CBSE has decided to conduct term two board exams for class 10 and class 12 from April 26. Meanwhile, students are still waiting for class 10 and 12 term-1 board exam results.

(With inputs from agencies)