MEKHANA SIBY Vs. COMMISSIONER FOR ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS KERALA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Petitioner seeks for a direction to include her in the rank list of Kerala Engineering, Architecture, Medicine, 2026 (for brevity 'KEAM'), after considering her qualifying marks of the twelfth standard, either by permitting her to upload those marks or by accepting the marks already available with the respondents.

(2.) Petitioner is a Higher Secondary School Graduate having passed the examination conducted by the Board of Higher Secondary Education on 26/5/2026 as per the results published. Though she had applied for the KEAM, and allegedly submitted all the necessary documents along with her application, when the results were published, her name was not included. According to the petitioner, she had uploaded her Higher Secondary course mark list in the web portal and she had scored 37.5255 out of 300 at the entrance examination, much above the minimum cut off for being included in the rank list. Since the petitioner has been excluded from the rank list without any reason, she has approached this Court seeking a direction for her inclusion. Petitioner also alleges that she was never intimated of any defect in her application, and hence it has to be presumed that she had uploaded the application with all the relevant documents.

(3.) A statement has been filed on behalf of the first respondent stating that the marks obtained by the candidates in the qualifying examinations are required to be entered into the online portal for calculating the rank as well as allotment. After referring to the procedure adopted, it was stated that the students will have to upload their marks within the time line mentioned to be included in the rank list. According to the respondents, though petitioner had submitted her application for the entrance examination, she had not submitted the qualifying examination marks through the candidate portal, within the time granted for that purpose and consequently no Mark Submission Confirmation Report evidencing successful submission of the petitioner's marks was generated in her candidate portal. It is also stated that petitioner is therefore not entitled to seek a direction to treat her qualifying examination marks as having been submitted or to permit submission of the petitioner's marks after the closure of the prescribed time limit. In the statement it is also mentioned that the qualifying examination marks received from the concerned Boards are made available to Commissionerate only through secure electronic data-transfer channels and are maintained in the system in a protected mode, which data is not automatically treated as a final submission for participation in the rank list and allotment process.