The Supreme Court on Thursday gave the Central Board of Secondary Education and the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education two weeks to decide on the criteria to evaluate Class 12 students, Live Law reported. Board exams for Class 12 were cancelled in view of the coronavirus crisis.

A bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar and Dinesh Maheshwari was hearing a petition filed by lawyer Mamata Sharma, asking that the boards devise an objective methodology to evaluate students within a set timeframe, the Hindustan Times reported. She filed the petition on the behalf of more than 7,000 parents.

The Supreme Court said it was happy to see the exams cancelled, but noted that the boards had not spelt out the criteria they would adopt to evaluate students, according to Live Law.

Attorney General for India KK Venugopal, appearing for CBSE, told the bench that the board will decide the evaluation criteria in two weeks, but CISCE’s lawyer JK Das sought four weeks.

The bench said since the matter was urgent, a four-week time period was too long. The judges added that the admission of students to colleges will get delayed if the decision on evaluation was not made soon.

“If you want, you can do it [decide the criteria] overnight also,” the bench told CISCE’s lawyer. “Do it in two weeks. AG [attorney general] has asked for reasonable time. Don’t bargain timeframe, in fact you should be doing it overnight.”

Follow today’s live updates on the Covid-19 crisis here.

The matter has been listed for hearing after two weeks.

India has been battling a devastating second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, the CBSE and CISCE announced that board exams for Class 12 had been cancelled. The decision was announced after CBSE held a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said that the health and safety of the students was of utmost importance and there would be no compromise on it.

Board exams for Class 10 had been cancelled in April, after which the CBSE, on May 1, introduced a new policy to calculate marks.

The new policy stated that students will be evaluated out of 100 marks for each subject. Twenty marks will be for internal assessment, while 80 will be based on a student’s performance in tests or pre-board exams conducted throughout the year. The CBSE added that the marks should be in consonance with the past performance of the school in Class 10 board examinations.