The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to postpone this year’s Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE 2022) exam amid the third wave of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak, noting that delaying the exam could lead to “chaos and uncertainty” for students.

GATE is an exam that primarily tests comprehensive understanding of various undergraduate subjects in engineering and science for entry into masters programmes and recruitment by some public sector companies.

With the green signal from the Supreme Court, the GATE 2022 exam will now be held on February 5, 6, 12 and 13 as planned.

Given the recent Covid -19 surge.

“In the current third wave, Covid-19 has spread severely in several states, cities due to its new variant Omicron. Several studies including one done by IIT Kanpur predict that the peak of the third wave In early February, the wave is expected to end in April. Therefore, the peak period is most likely to coincide with the usual exam dates for GATE,” the petition reads.

“If exam dates are not postponed, candidates attending GATE 2022 will be at imminent risk of contracting and spreading the virus, threatening their lives as well as the lives of their families,” it added.

However, Supreme Court justices, led by Justice DY Chandrachud, told petitioners today that exams are a matter of government policy and any intervention by the courts at this stage will only lead to “chaos and uncertainty” among students.

The court said the first and second waves of Covid-19 were not the same as the third wave, with up to 20 exams conducted by government agencies having to be postponed in a similar fashion recently.

“We can’t start postponing exams like this,” the court noted, according to excerpts published by Bar and Bench. “Now that everything is open, we can’t play students’ careers like this. One petitioner is a coaching center. It’s an academic policy issues.”

The Supreme Court also noted that while hundreds of thousands of students across the country have been preparing for exams, only 20,000 candidates have signed an online petition calling for the exams to be postponed. Therefore, in order to avoid confusion and uncertainty for other students, the Supreme Court said it has decided to reject the petition seeking to postpone the GATE 2022 exam.

Complete News Source : Hindustan Times