IAS aspirant claims four questions in Prelims were wring; moves SC

Satya Prakash
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, October 4

Claiming that four questions of the Civil Services Preliminary Examination 2017 were incorrect, an IAS aspirant on Wednesday moved the Supreme Court seeking direction to the Union Public Service Commission to disclose the answer key.

“It is high time that UPSC should shed its culture of opacity in the name of autonomy and imbibe in itself a spirit of transparency in the interest of meritocracy and nation building,” petitioner Vishal Rathi said, asking the top court to order setting up of an Independent Expert Committee to look into the matter.

He demanded that if the court prima facie found that the questions/answers were ambiguous or structured wrongly and that the key to the correct answers was wrong or that the questions corresponded to two correct answers, the merit list should be re-drawn.

He requested the court to direct the UPSC to allow him to participate in the Main Examination scheduled to commence from 28 October 2017, if the Expert Committee opined partly or wholly in his favour.

Over 4,62,000 candidates participated in the Civil Services Preliminary Examinations conducted by the UPSC on June 18, 2017. According to the UPSC there was only one correct answer to each question.

According to the petitioner, at least 4 questions out of 100 were ambiguous and not structured coherently so that there were two equally plausible correct answers. Under such circumstances, a more astute student would know that from authoritative texts two correct answers were possible.

Such a student would avoid answering the question at all since negative marks were awarded for a wrong answer. The result would be that such a student would either lose 2 marks for the question not answered or lose 2.67 marks for choosing an answer not corresponding to the ‘key’, he explained. 

Key is the list of correct answers but it has not been disclosed by UPSC and it is said that it will be disclosed at the end of the merit examination, almost after a year. “This is arbitrary and prevents the students from making good their case that the correct answers were either not correct at all or were not the only correct answer,” the petitioner contended.