Karachi University Removes Exam Controller Over Allegations 150 Failed Law Students Were Passed

Karachi University has removed its Controller of Examinations and installed a replacement after a scrutiny committee's handling of a disputed law-school exam allegedly turned roughly 150 failing results into passing ones, in a case that is still working through conflicting accounts from the officials involved.

What the scrutiny committee did

The episode centres on an LLB Part II paper taken by students at two of the university's affiliated institutions, SM Law College and Islamia Law College. A scrutiny committee — comprising Dean of the Faculty of Law Barrister Sarfraz Maitlo, representatives from both colleges and the Controller of Examinations — met on August 5, 2026 and recommended reassessing that paper. Students who had originally failed subsequently received passing marks, reported in the range of 50 to 65, after the reassessment went through. Dean Maitlo has said the committee was formed, with the vice chancellor's approval, because the affected students had been treated unfairly in the original marking.

The recommendation was approved by Dr Tufail Jokhio, who was serving as acting vice chancellor at the time. That approval is now the center of the dispute.

Why the university's former vice chancellor intervened

Dr Khalid Iraqi, Karachi University's former permanent vice chancellor, has said the process departed from how the university normally handles grade disputes. Under the university's annual examination system, he said, scrutiny is supposed to be limited to recounting marks already awarded on an answer script — confirming that the arithmetic and tallying were done correctly — not reopening the script itself for a fresh assessment. He also noted that the request behind this scrutiny arrived as a single collective application covering roughly 150 students, where the university's standard practice is for each student to file an individual application. Dr Iraqi said he had halted the process on those grounds before it went ahead under the acting vice chancellor.

The removal, and what remains disputed

Following the probe into the episode, Dr Yasir — the Controller of Examinations at the time the scrutiny results were finalised — has been replaced by Dr Syed Ghufran, an associate professor in the university's Department of Food Science. Local reporting has described Dr Yasir as denying that any student's result was improperly passed or failed through the process, and he has declined to comment further. Neither Dr Jokhio nor the examinations office has issued a public response laying out their side of events in detail, and no university statement has formally established a finding of misconduct — the case remains, for now, a matter of competing accounts rather than a closed inquiry.

Why a scrutiny-process dispute matters beyond one exam

Karachi University is one of Pakistan's oldest and largest public universities, and the credibility of its degree-granting process extends well past the roughly 150 students directly affected by this one paper. Pakistan's Higher Education Commission has separately warned students this year about the risks of unrecognised arrangements undermining the value of a degree, in its alert on unapproved foreign degree partnerships — a different problem with the same underlying stakes: a credential is only worth what the institution behind it can vouch for. A public university accused of bending its own scrutiny rules to convert a batch of failing grades into passing ones, whatever the eventual finding, lands at a moment when Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has already described Pakistan's education system as facing a human capital "national emergency" over far more basic access and completion failures.

What happens next

The scrutiny committee's August 5 recommendation, the acting vice chancellor's approval, and the subsequent removal of the controller leave open questions that only a university inquiry — or a Higher Education Commission review, should it choose to open one — is positioned to answer: whether the reassessment broke the university's own rules as Dr Iraqi contends, who specifically authorised a collective rather than individual review, and whether any of the roughly 150 affected students' results will be revisited again. For now, Karachi University has changed the person responsible for its exams without yet saying, on the record, whether the students whose fail became a pass earned it.

Build Better Pakistan's Education Desk is tracking the Karachi University scrutiny case and will update this piece if the university or HEC issues a formal finding.