Calcutta High Court has been flooded with a record number of petitions — 300-odd at last count — from students dissatisfied with their marks in Higher Secondary 2008 and wanting a look at their answer scripts.

Around 50 students who took the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering and medical studies have moved court, too, asking for a review of their rankings. The high court has already asked the West Bengal Higher Secondary Council to reveal the answer scripts of 42 students. The remaining petitions are awaiting disposal.

Students approach courts for scrutiny of examination results every year, but the last time so many of them filed petitions asking for their answer scripts was in 2003.

“Around 200 students moved petitions in 2003, demanding that their scripts be shown to them. But this year, many more aggrieved students have come to court to get justice,” advocate Supradip Roy said.

In the cases pertaining to the JEE results, the court has so far asked the West Bengal JEE Board to “preserve” the answer scripts of 17 of the petitioners and file affidavits on the allegations made by them.

The board maintains that it cannot be forced to show the script of a student who disputes his ranking. “A division bench of the high court, headed by Chief Justice S.S. Nijjar, has already passed an order observing that the JEE board is not bound to show the scripts to the students. So, a judge of the same court cannot ask us to produce the scripts,” board counsel Subrata Mukhopadhaya said.

The Higher Secondary council, on the other hand, will be producing the first lot of scripts in court on July 11. It will show a few more on July 18 and July 28.

Ranajit Chatterjee, the lawyer representing the council, said: “Each year, some students come to court and ask my client to produce their scripts. In most cases, the marks remain unchanged.”

Some of the students who are disputing JEE rankings have high Higher Secondary aggregates. For instance, Indradwip Banerjee, a former South Point student who secured 94 per cent in Madhyamik, 92 per cent in Higher Secondary and was ranked 5,070 in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination, is questioning his JEE rank of 8,863.

Another student, Kishore Bharati from Dum Dum, did well in Higher Secondary and was ranked 4,565 in the national entrance test. In the JEE list, he was No. 12,398.