The duty of the court to ensure justice in competitive examinations, correction of evaluation irregularities, and the importance of fair procedure in selection.

NAVANITI PRASAD SINGH, J.

1. These four Intra-Court Letters Patent Appeals have been filed assailing the judgment and order dated 20.8.2013 passed by learned Single Judge in CWJC No. 3640 of 2013 and analogous writ applications by which the learned Single Judge set aside the results of the Main examination with consequential direction to the Staff Selection Commission (hereinafter referred to as Commission) to prepare fresh results of the Graduate Level Combined Examination 2010, in accordance with the directions of the Court in relation to deletion/modification of questions and answers as given therein.

2. LPA No. 1200 of 2013 is by candidates who were not the party to the writ proceedings but had been declared selected as per the results first published but were then shown to be not qualified as per the revised results pursuant to the directions of this Court by the learned Single Judge. The other three Letters Patent Appeals i.e. LPA Nos. 1170, 1174 and 1352 all of 2013 are by candidates who were writ petitioners and assailed the judgment of the learned Single Judge in not granting them full relief in respect of all the questions that were questioned. Even after the revised results as per the directions of this Court they have not been selected.

3. It may be noted here that in these Letters Patent Appeals public notices through Newspapers were issued for attention of all the candidates who had been selected pursuant to the revised results and large number of them have been made respondents in representative capacity who have also been served notices personally.

4. In the first Letter Patent Appeal i.e. LPA No. 1200 of 2013, Sri Anil Kumar Sinha, learned Counsel appears for the appellants who had been originally selected but upon revised results pursuant to the direction of this Court failed to get selected. Challenge has been made primarily on the ground that once the results were published and they were selected, this Court ought not to have interfered and even if interfered their selection ought not to have been reversed. If anything, then the whole examination should have been cancelled and re-examination ordered.

5. Having heard Sri Anil Kumar Sinha, learned Advocate, the answers to his submission are simple. In a public competitive examination based on multiple choice questions no one can be permitted to get undue advantage of wrong questions or wrong answers and if it is found that the marking was wrong either because there was mistake in the questions themselves or in the model answer used to evaluate the results, this Court cannot shut its eyes and permit undue advantage to persons who were rightfully not entitled to mark they scored and deprived the candidate who had rightly answered of their rightful place in the merit list. One must keep in mind that in objective multiple choice type examinations with negative marking for wrong answers every question is important and especially when tens of thousands of candidates are appearing. There is great tussle for each mark to get into the select list. In the present examination, there were four marks for every right answer and one negative mark for every wrong answer. Thus, where the model answer by which the results were evaluated were wrong then a person who wrongly answer can be marked right gaining four marks and a person who rightly answer would lose not only four marks but would incur one negative mark. If the model answers being wrong did not tally with the correct answer it has thus serious repercussions. Similarly, if questions were ambiguous then someone would risk answering and depending upon his luck and not knowledge, he would gain unfair advantage and someone seeing the ambiguity would not risk answering at all, that would not be a fair procedure. Therefore, if it is brought to the notice of the Court that the model answers were wrong or if the questions were ambiguous or there was any other conflict then it would be the duty of the Court to do jus