High Court quashes KEAM 2025 entrance exam results
THE Kerala High Court on Wednesday (July 9, 2025) quashed the results of the Kerala Engineering Architecture Medical (KEAM) 2025 entrance examinations. The results were announced earlier this month.
Disposing of the petition, Justice D.K. Singh directed the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations to publish the rank list in accordance with the prospectus issued in February. It noted that the revised method in KEAM 2025 to calculate the ranks adversely affected students who studied the CBSE or ICSE syllabus in their higher secondary classes.
The order came on a petition filed by Hana Fatima Ahnus and other students who had appeared for the KEAM exam, stating that the exam’s prospectus was amended after the exams were held. The court termed this “an illegal move.”
The petitioners, who had attended the entrance exam, had alleged that the ranking procedure was amended on the date of publication of the rank list. Ms. Ahnus said this adversely affected her and that her rank was pushed to 4,209.
A candidate who obtained similar marks in 2024 had been ranked 1,907, she said in her petition, and alleged that the amendment was “arbitrary, illegal and malafide.” She further contended that this was made with “the oblique motive to do away with” the weightage given to CBSE and ICSE students.
They challenged the changes to the prospectus at the final stage of the examination process—an hour before the publication of the rank list. The earlier prospectus had been prepared on the basis of the recommendation of the expert committee in 2011.
Citing Clause 1.6 of the prospectus, the government’s counsel said this gave power to the government to make changes in the prospectus at any point of time, even on the date of publishing the rank list.
In its judgment, the court said that ‘while possessing the power to do something is one thing, how that power is exercised is quite another. The prospectus was published on February 19 and applications were invited from students to participate in the KEAM entrance exam.
After the exams, the government suddenly woke up — an hour before publishing the rank list, because it got some supernatural wisdom to realise that the prospectus was glaringly illegal and needed an amendment. The authorities concerned decided to change the formulae in the most arbitrary, illegal and unjustified manner,’ it added.
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Observing that a Division Bench of the court had earlier ruled that a prospectus cannot be changed after the last date of submitting applications – which was March 2025, in this case, the court said the Government is denuded of its power even under Clause 1.6 to change the prospectus. Rules of the game cannot be changed midway, once the game has begun.
Prima facie, it appears that somebody looked at the results and found that students from the Kerala stream have not done fairly good, and to satisfy the constituency, such a malafide decision was taken arbitrarily to change the prospectus an hour before publication of the rank list, it said.
The sudden change of the KEAM-2025 standardisation formula had left many students feeling frustrated and disillusioned as it impacted their expected ranks, following which many of them lodged complaints with the Kerala government, claiming that the normalisation method used this year was unfair and illogical.
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It had been reported that last year, State higher secondary students had suffered due to the flawed standardisation process by the Commissioner of Entrance Examinations (CEE), which conducted KEAM. This year, however, CBSE and ICSE students were facing the brunt of it.
The Unaided Schools Protection Council (USPC), an umbrella body of private schools, too had moved the High Court against the new standardisation method.
