IIT Roorkee Students' Expulsion & Subsequent Readmission

Students' raising voice proved out to be profitable perhaps

IIT Roorkee had recently expelled a large number of students from 1st year B. Tech in one go creating much flutter among students. But this Monday brought a good news for students when the authorities said they would take back all 72 students they had expelled because of poor performance. The students will be put on academic probation in the first year and have to repeat the year. They will be bound to again clear all the courses of both autumn and spring semesters of the first year besides maintaining a minimum attendance of 75% in every subject. A fact is that this was not the first time an IIT had expelled and then readmitted students for underperforming.

Students and their parents had appealed to the university, which in turn held a meeting to reconsider the future of the expelled students and finally held their decision in favour of students.

IIT-R earlier stated that this move was aimed to enhance quality of education in the institute. The institute authorities had strong evidence in the form of a declaration signed by students and parents at the time of admission stating the expulsion of students in case their CGPA turns out to be less than 5.0. As a result, when victims had appealed to judiciary, both District and High court, ruled their decision against the 71 out of the 73 students expelled. Since 2 students had marks very close to 5.0 CGPA, the high court instructed IIT-R to reconsider their decision in this case. The intitution admitted back one out of these two but fate of 72 students was still dubious till Monday's declaration.

The institute's officials believed that the expulsion of non-serious students would improve the study environment. According to teachers at IIT the change in the question pattern of entrance examinations brought almost a decade ago was to be blamed for the situation. Earlier the IIT entrance comprised of both objective and subjective questions, but it was changed to purely objective to remove the factors of bias and fraud in admissions. It was claimed by the institute that not all the students selected through an MCQ test were able to match the curriculum standards of IITs. IIT-R claimed to have warned the students about low grades consequences well before their second semester examination, on the other hand students denied this fact. IIT-R also claimed that many students of first year were taking studies casually. As the future of 72 students was at stake the authorities revoked their decision but obviously at some conditions.

Ecstatic at the reversal of the expulsion orders, Raj Maheshwari, one of the expelled students, said, “I am in Nagpur right now and I was thinking of applying to other colleges. But today's decision has brought back all of us from the lowest point of our lives."

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