On their toes after a raft of court cases and the rap that followed, Bengal’s education bosses have decided to open a window in 2005 for dissatisfied or failed Higher Secondary (HS) candidates who want to get their scripts re-evaluated.

For the first time in the history of the 30-year-old HS, from 2005, an examinee will be able to get a script reviewed if he is dissatisfied with his marks and feels he deserves a second evaluation, officers said on Tuesday.

“If things go according to plan, we should before long be able to make a formal decision on introducing the system of HS scripts review or re-evaluation,” said Jyotirmoy Mukherjee, president of the West Bengal Council of Higher Education. Already, re-evaluation of scripts is allowed by the state Madhyamik board as well as Calcutta University.

In an indication of what the future holds for the exam system, Mukherjee announced on Tuesday the council’s decision to hold a special scrutiny of scripts of about 10 candidates — all from Calcutta — who have secured positions on the merit list for engineering aspirants in the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEE), but had failed to clear HS 2004.

“It was only on July 27, after the HS results were announced, that they realised they had failed,” he said. The special scrutiny may have to be widened soon to cover more such students who failed HS but cleared the JEE.

Apparently, the HS council’s decision was precipitated by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s government, which had been pressuring it to fill up seats in private engineering colleges in Calcutta and elsewhere in the state for the past several months. If the 10 JEE merit list qualifiers continued as HS failures, they would have no option but to vacate the seats they hold in certain private engineering colleges.

“For the first time in nine years, we have ensured near-100 per cent occupancy in these colleges,” said the officers, adding that they believed the number of students demanding a special scrutiny in light of their joint entrance test performances will go up in the days ahead.

“Many boys and girls have failed HS, and we do not have a clear idea about how many of them are on the JEE merit list,” they said.

The government believes measures such as re-evaluation and special scrutiny will help reduce the number of court cases relating to alleged under-marking of scripts.