The Supreme Court will hear a plea seeking Cancellation of Cost Management Accounting(CMA) Online Tests on account of alleged malpractice held by the Institute of Cost Accountants of India(ICMAI) in January-February 2021.
The petitioner is a student of CMA Final course, who has alleged widespread malpractices in the exam, which affected its credibility and sanctity.
“The online home-based exams were conducted by the same vendor which had already failed in providing reliable Remote Proctoring for the National Law Admission Test(NLAT) of September-2020, which was ultimately set aside by the Supreme Court in the case Rakesh Kumar Agarwalla & Another Vs. National Law School of India University Bengaluru and Others. The Supreme Court had canceled the NLAT in September last week on the ground that the home-based online test failed in ensuring transparency, fairness, and integrity which are essential in an exam process,” the petition said.
The petitioner alleged that “mass-scale cheating” was reported when the exams started in January 2021, with answers being circulated on WhatsApp and live exam sessions being shared on Social media. Though the students reported such instances to the authorities, the petitioner alleges that no action was taken.
Instead of taking cognizance of large-scale cheating complaints, the petitioner says that the ICMAI issued a circular which slammed the reports of cancellation of exams as “false propaganda”. Further, the ICMAI said in the circular that it has lodged an FIR against “miscreants trying to degrade the dignity and integrity of the examination”.
The petition added that Instead of acknowledging the proctoring failures and initiating effective counter-measure or suspending further conduct of the examination, the Institute chose to label all Whistle-blowers astrouble-makers, directed them to cease sharing their concerns publicly and threatened them of debarring for up to five years.
It is said that due to severe technical glitches, the exams got stretched over a period of 8 weeks, for 24 days, from January 3, 2021, to February 24, 2021, instead of the normal schedule of just 8 days.
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