Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Service Selection Commission v. Brijendra Pratap Singh
Background
In a 2015 recruitment exam for Gram Panchayat Adhikari in Uttar Pradesh, one question asked who the sitting Panchayati Raj Minister was; the intended correct answer, Shri Kailash Yadav, had died 12 days before the exam was held, making that answer technically wrong on the exam date. The Commission decided to give a mark to everyone who selected Kailash Yadav or left the question blank, but not to those who chose any other (wrong) option. The respondent, who answered with the wrong name and missed the cutoff by just one mark, challenged this before the High Court, which directed the Commission to either delete the question or award him the mark too.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that the Commission's chosen approach was a reasonable and defensible way of handling an unforeseen, unusual situation (the minister's sudden death just before the exam), and was not "palpably perverse" or arbitrary: the standard needed for a court to interfere with an examining body's academic/administrative decision. It distinguished between candidates who answered with the once-correct option or left it blank versus those, like the respondent, who picked an answer that was wrong at every point in time, finding the Commission's differential treatment logical. The Court also noted that deleting the question at this late stage would unsettle an already-completed selection and appointments, and set aside the High Court's judgment, restoring the Commission's original decision.
Lesson Learnt
Courts generally will not second-guess the academic or administrative judgment calls of an examination body unless that judgment is clearly irrational or arbitrary, especially where undoing the decision would disrupt a selection process that has already moved forward and resulted in appointments.