The court has dismissed an urgent application by two LLB students from Walter Sisulu University, who sought additional marks to pass a key module. The court ruled that their claims lacked urgency and legal merit, ultimately dismissing the application with costs.
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The Eastern Cape High Court has dismissed an urgent application by two LLB students from Walter Sisulu University, who sought additional marks to pass a key module. The court ruled that their claims lacked urgency and legal merit, ultimately dismissing the application with costs.
Judge Nozuko Gloria Mjali rejected the students’ bid for an interim interdict that would have compelled the university to allocate an additional five percent attendance mark to their Legal Research Methods module.
The students argued that the inclusion of the marks would have pushed their final results above the pass threshold.
The applicants approached the court in late November 2025, seeking urgent relief ahead of the university’s December closure and the start of the 2026 academic year. They argued that failure to resolve the issue swiftly would prevent them from progressing to law school and potentially exclude them from the May 2026 graduation cycle.
However, the court found that the urgency claimed by the students was not justified. Judge Mjali noted that the dispute over the marks had been ongoing for some time and that the students were informed of their final results as early as 13 October 2025. Despite this, they only launched their application more than a month later.
“The urgency in this matter was self-created,” the court found, pointing out that by the time the matter was heard on 23 December 2025, the university had already closed for the holidays, making it impractical to implement the relief sought.
On this basis alone, the matter was struck from the urgent roll.
Even if urgency had been established, the court held that the students failed to meet the legal requirements for an interim interdict.
Central to their case was the assertion that the university had not added a five percent attendance mark to their final scores. The university, however, disputed this, stating that such marks are discretionary and had already been factored into the students’ results.
Crucially, the students did not challenge the validity of their original marks and conceded that they had failed the module. Their argument rested solely on the expectation that an additional five percent would elevate their results to a pass.
Judge Mjali found that this did not establish a prima facie right to the relief sought. The court also rejected the students’ claim that their constitutional right to education had been infringed, noting that they had been given the opportunity to study and complete their course but had not achieved a passing mark.
In a further setback, the court dismissed an argument raised for the first time in the replying affidavit—that their scripts had not been externally moderated in line with university policy.
The judge reiterated the established legal principle that applicants must stand or fall by their founding papers and cannot introduce new claims at a later stage.
Describing interim interdicts as an “exceptional remedy,” the court emphasised that such relief must be granted cautiously and only where all legal requirements are clearly met. In this case, the applicants failed to demonstrate even the most basic requirement of a prima facie right.
The court ultimately dismissed the application with costs.