Bengaluru: Those pursuing pre-university courses should keep tabs on their attendance and make sure they have the requisite 75% attendance, or they may not be allowed to appear for examination.
Recently, a division bench of the High Court refused to interfere with the order of single judge bench dismissing the plea of some PUC students seeking relaxation from attendance shortage. The single judge had disallowed the students from appearing for second year PUC examination for want of required attendance.
The advocates for the students had challenged the order of the single judge on the ground that it was contrary to a decision of this court in Prajwal Kumar Patil vs. Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences.
To examine as to whether the students were eligible to appear for the examination in the absence of the requisite attendance, the court felt that it is relevant to refer to Rule 12 of the Karnataka Pre-University Education (Academic, Registration, Administration and Grant-in-Aid etc) Rules, 2006, which reads as follows: “Rule 12 - Minimum days of attendance.—(1) A student shall have attendance of 75 per cent of the total number of periods in each subject during the academic year to become eligible to
appear for the annual examination. “
Further, the rules stated that the director shall notify the minimum number of hours of periods of teaching in respect of each subject and also the minimum number of hours of experiments to be conducted by the student in each science subject. “A student who fails to put in the minimum period of study and attendance in the class and also a science student who fails to conduct the minimum hours of experiments in the laboratories successfully, shall not be eligible to appear for the annual examination,” it stated.
After taking it into account, the court said that the does not provide for any relaxation of the minimum attendance to any extent under any circumstance.
“Therefore, compliance of Rule 12 is mandatory. In other words, unless a student has the minimum attendance as required under Rule 12 of the Rules during the academic year, he shall not be eligible to appear for the annual examination.”
The students who had filed the appeal had attendance between 26% and 58%.
Therefore, admittedly, they had not put in the minimum attendance as required under Rule 12 of the Rules, and hence, were ineligible to appear for the examination, the court ordered while dismissing the appeals of the students.
