UPTET | Allahabad High Court Orders Exclusion Of Questions With Two Correct Options, Equal Benefit To All Candidates

The Allahabad High Court has held that where the examining authority itself accepts two options as correct in a multiple-choice question requiring the candidate to mark a single answer, the question must be excluded from evaluation.

It held that the benefit cannot be confined to candidates who happened to mark one of the two accepted options.

The dispute concerned Question Nos. 36 and 37 of the Master Set in the Uttar Pradesh Teacher Eligibility Test, 2026, for each of which the final answer key of the U.P. Education Service Selection Commission accepted two of the four options as correct.

Justice Vinod Diwakar held,

“A multiple-choice question in which the candidate is required to select a single correct answer from four options ceases to serve any evaluative purpose once the examining authority itself accepts two of those options as correct, for the question is then no longer capable of discriminating between a candidate who knows the answer and one who does not.”

Four candidates appeared in the primary-level examination held on 03.07.2026. In the final answer key, published along with the result on 26.08.2026, options (D) and (B) were both accepted as correct for Question No. 36, and options (A) and (D) for Question No. 37. All four were declared not qualified, their normalised scores ranging from 80.40104 to 81.39740 against the qualifying mark of 82. Marks for the two questions had been credited only to candidates who marked either accepted option; none of the petitioners had.

Giving up the prayer for award of individual marks, counsel for the petitioners confined the case to the submission that the defective questions be treated as deleted, or equal marks given to all candidates irrespective of the option marked.

Reliance was placed on Smt. Shimla Singh v. State of U.P., decided on 19.12.2018, where the Court, treating UPTET as a qualifying examination involving no inter-se competition, directed one mark to be awarded to every candidate on questions admitting more than one correct answer. The Commission, it was pointed out, had itself dropped Question No. 38 of the same paper.

For the Commission it was submitted that the petitioners had marked neither accepted option and had not objected to the provisional answer key, and that Smt. Shimla Singh did not hold good law for having overlooked the Division Bench decision in Sunil Kumar Singh v. State of U.P.

The petitioners replied that Sunil Kumar Singh had been set aside in its entirety by the Supreme Court on 05.08.2026.

The Court noted that the grievance was not a disagreement with the answer key but arose from the Commission's own determination that two options were correct.

Holding exclusion warranted, it relied on Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Service Selection Commission v. Ashok Yadav, where the Supreme Court held that a court may order exclusion of the offending question where two answers could be correct though only one is to be chosen, and on Ran Vijay Singh v. State of U.P., which described exclusion as the way out of such an impasse.

“It bears notice that exclusion is also the course the Commission itself adopted in this very examination in respect of Question No. 38. There is no intelligible basis upon which two questions found to admit of two correct answers each should be treated differently from a third question dropped from the same paper.”

The Commission's method of crediting marks only to candidates who had selected one of the two accepted options could not be sustained, the Court held, resting as it did on the chance of a choice made upon a question incapable of a single correct answer.

“Exclusion, by contrast, treats every candidate alike: it neither rewards nor penalizes the choice made upon a defective question.”

The paper shall accordingly be treated as comprising 148 questions, with the qualifying standard computed at the prescribed percentages, following Rishal v. Rajasthan Public Service Commission.

Directing that the two questions be excluded from evaluation, the Court ordered that the consequential benefit be extended uniformly to all similarly situated candidates and not restricted to those who had marked either accepted option, and that the respondents recompute the petitioners' scores and correct their results. It clarified that the relief would not by itself confer any right to appointment or selection in a subsequent recruitment.

The writ petition was disposed of.

Counsel for Petitioner(s): Ankita Singh, Taniya Pandey

Counsel for Respondent(s) : C.S.C. Shiv Kumar Singh, Udayan Nandan