Supreme Court notes CBSE policy for West Asia Class 12 students, disposes of plea

The Supreme Court Monday took note of a fresh CBSE policy for Class 12 private candidates in West Asian countries whose board examinations were cancelled due to the US-Iran war, and disposed of a petition concerning the declaration of results of a student affected by the change.

The court was hearing a petition of a Class 12 student from Saudi Arabia, Pransu Jigarkumar Patel, seeking directions to the Board to declare the results of his improvement exam.

This came after Solicitor General Tushar Mehta informed a bench of Justices SVN Bhatti and Vipul M Pancholi about the Central Board of Secondary Education’s policy.

Mehta said both regular and private candidates were affected by the exam cancellations, and for private candidates, the difficulty was that they had no school to provide internal assessment records, such as quarterly, half-yearly, and pre-board examination marks, which were used to evaluate their results.

The senior law officer pointed out that on January 21, 2026, CBSE had notified a new policy for these private candidates as well. Mehta said, accordingly, the marks for subjects where examinations were cancelled would be computed as 40 per cent of theory marks scored in Class 10 board exam and 60 per cent of theory marks scored in the Class 12.

Mehta pointed out that for assessing a Class 10 student’s performance, the average of the top three scoring subjects was used, normalised against the maximum marks for each subject.

Class 12 student’s plea

In his plea, Patel contended that after the exams in many Middle Eastern countries were cancelled by CBSE, a scheme was put in place to assess the students. As per this scheme, “Assessment Scheme for Declaration of Results of Class XII in West Asian Countries”, students whose exams were pending because of the cancellation were to be assessed based on their school records.

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In 2025, Patel, a Class 12 student at the International Indian School in Al Jubail, registered as a private candidate in Saudi Arabia for the 2026 Improvement Examination in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, English, and Computer Science.

However, after the Board cancelled some Class 12 exams in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, etc, he could sit only for the Physics and Chemistry papers. When the results were announced, his status was marked “Result Later”.

He contended that his records were available with the school and could have been used to make the assessment, and that the refusal to do so was impacting his plans to pursue further studies.

Hearing Patel’s petition earlier this month, the Supreme Court had sought a response from the Board.

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On Monday, Mehta informed the bench that Patel’s result, computed under the new policy, had been emailed to him and would also be updated in his DigiLocker account. He added that the new policy also provided that, if a student was not satisfied with the results, they could take a chance in the next regular exam.

The court took the new policy on record, finding it substantially addressed the petitioner’s concerns, and disposed of his petition.