Plea in Delhi HC seeking quashing of Civil Services Prelims exam 2023

The plea filed by advocate Rajeev Kumar Dubey states that the petitioners are aggrieved by the “arbitrariness of the commission” in conducting “this entire recruitment cycle”.

“Not providing to the students the answer key of an exam they have appeared for, not considering the representations of the candidates despite a particular time window being provided for the same, and asking questions, which are disproportionately vague, testing candidates’ ability to answer only on the basis of guesswork, is not only arbitrary but defies all principles of fairness, logic and rationality,” the plea states.

The plea states that normally when a competitive exam is conducted the answer key to the questions (multiple choice questions) is prepared in advance so that the same can be released after the exam is conducted giveing a “fair evaluation to the candidates”. However the June 12 press note titled “result of civil services preliminary examination” mentions that, “candidates are also informed that marks, cut off marks and answer keys of CS(P) Examination, 2023 will be uploaded on the Commission’s website i.e. https://upsc.gov.in only after the entire process of the Civil Services Examination 2023 is over, that is, after the declaration of final result”, the plea states.

The plea states that it is not a prerogative of the Commission to upload the answer key as per “its own whims and fancies” and uploading the answer key after the culmination of the entire process “defeats the whole purpose of the answer key”.

The plea further states that almost all state Public Service Commissions and other authorities like the High Court of Delhi in respect of Delhi Judicial Service Examination, IITs, NLUs and IIMs release the provisional answer key within a week of the conduct of an examination and invite objections from the candidates. They then release the final answer key by modifying their provisional answer key based on the objections, it added

On Wednesday, a division bench of the HC asked the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) to expeditiously decide on a plea moved by the UPSC candidates seeking reduction in the cut-off from 33% to 23% for qualifying Part II (CSAT) paper of 2023 Civil Services Examination (CSE).