St. Stephen College

Attendance Shortfall Case: HC Urges DU To Declare Results Of Students

The students, represented by senior advocate Kirti Uppal and advocates Himanshu Dhuper and Samarendra Kumar, argued that the law faculty was in contempt of the high court’s direction to conduct the classes. They also agreed with the court’s suggestion to declare their results.

The law faculty said it has not compiled the results of the students who sat for the exams on the single judge’s orders. The single judge had come down heavily on DU for “illegally” detaining around 500 students for lack of attendance and ordered holding of supplementary exams, saying it was a “failure” of the law faculty.

 

In its appeal, the varsity has contended that the single judge in her July 6 order had ignored the fact that all the three law centres had completed the course within the total number of lectures held.

The university has contended in the appeal that the single judge had “over-stressed” the rule that 450 class hours must be conducted, irrespective of the fact that the syllabus for all the subjects for the respective semesters was already completed as planned. It has said no syllabus remained that may be taught to the detained students in these additional classes.

The single judge, while granting relief to law students, had said the shortfall of attendance was caused due to “failure of the faculty of law to conduct minimum classes as prescribed under the Bar Council of India rules”.

The court had passed a slew of directions and directed law faculty members to conduct, within eight weeks, at least 139 hours of extra classes/tutorials for students who are desirous to attend lectures to make up for the shortage of attendance.

The court had issued the directions while disposing 21 separate petitions filed by 53 students, challenging the memorandum issued by the law faculty on May 7 and May 8 and May 10, detaining several students of fourth and sixth semester from appearing in exams for not having an aggregate attendance of 70 per cent in the semesters, as required by the BCI Rules.

It had also said there were “glaring discrepancies” in the attendance record and it was maintained in the “most archaic fashion” by the authorities. As an interim relief, the high court had ordered that the students, who have approached the court after being detained by the DU due to lack of attendance, be allowed to sit for their ongoing examinations subject to the outcome of the petitions.

The court had said the faculty must allow those students, who were detained due to the shortage of attendance and could not be granted the interim relief, to take their supplementary examinations for the semester concerned.

In the pleas filed on behalf of the detained law students, it was claimed that DU Law Faculty’s three centres – Campus Law Centre, Law Centre 1 and Law Centre 2 – have arbitrarily, illegally and without issuing any show-cause notice detained hundreds of them.

The single judge had quashed the detention lists issued by the law faculty regarding students who could not meet the prescribed attendance criteria due to the faculty of law’s failure to hold the prescribed mandatory minimum number of class hours during the concerned semester.

~ Preksha Mishra

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