New Delhi:
The Delhi High Court yesterday dismissed a law graduate's plea alleging that some of the multiple choice questions asked in the recently-held Delhi Judicial Service Preliminary Examination (DJSE) had more than one correct option.
A bench of justices S Ravindra Bhat and Vipin Sanghi while rejecting the petition claiming that three questions in DJSE had more than one right answer held that the answer keys provided were not ambiguous so as to confuse the candidates.
The court noted that that the petitioner did not think it necessary to object to the questions before the deadline for objections, but only after the results were published in which he had missed the cut-off by mere two marks.
"In the present case, this court has recorded findings on each of the three questions, to say that the answer keys used for correcting the question papers used one single correct answer.
"The alternative options cannot be said to be unambiguously clear answers, so as to result in confusion on the part of the examinee, who attempted the preliminary test," the court said.
The court passed the order on a plea of Salil Maheshwari, represented by advocate R K Kapoor, who had contended that 11 of the 200 multiple choice questions in the preliminary examination were incorrect.
In his petition, Maheshwari contended that he had sent a representation on June 17 to the Joint Registrar (Vigilance), High Court of Delhi, regarding the incorrect questions after the answer key was put up on the high court's website.
Only one objection raised by the petitioner was accepted by the high court registrar, while four were termed plausible, the petition had said, adding that when the results were declared Maheshwari missed the cut-off by mere two marks.
He had alleged that a majority of the objections raised by him were rejected arbitrarily and had sought that the "questions as objected to by the petitioner are liable to be rectified and the objectionable questions ought to be deleted".
The petitioner had claimed that "if appropriate rectification is done, he would be through for the main examination". The judge, however, said, "it is of the opinion that the petitioner cannot be heard to challenge the answer key to a particular question, after having discovered that he was awarded no marks for his response, it being at variance with the answer key".
"Here, the last date for communicating objections was June 23, 2014, and the respondent released its response to the objections on July 2, 2014. The results were only published on July 8, 2014.
"It appears that petitioner did not think it necessary to object to this question before the deadline for objections, but only sought to object after the results were published on July 8, 2014 by way of this petition filed on August 1, 2014," the court said.
"This court finds that the petitioner was therefore stopped from raising a challenge at this belated stage since a challenge cannot be advanced against a selection process only after the candidate has discovered his or her unsuccessful performance in the process," it added.