Apex court to hear plea on UPSC prelim exam today

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear a PIL complaining there were wrong questions in this year’s Civil Services Preliminary exam conducted on June 18.

Law student Ashita Chawla, a UPSC aspirant who took the test, mentioned the petition before a bench headed by justice Dipak Misra who agreed to hear the case on Thursday.

Chawla claimed this year’s paper had questions with multiple answers and many were open to subjective interpretation of the examinees. She said there is no predetermined syllabus for prelims and the pattern changes every year.

Chawla said that the standard of the paper has seen a marked decline over the past two years. Last year, the exam had questions testing rote learning of current affairs, similar to those asked in clerical exams.

The applicants resort to either matching their answers with the keys released by coaching institutes or look up answers on the internet and various books.

“This year was a new low, wherein all standards of lowliness were broken,” Chawla claimed, adding that the absence of any answer key has left the future of the aspirants uncertain. Unlike the previous years, this year’s paper had multiple answers and questions open to subjective interpretation.

The coaching keys themselves differed in about 10-12 questions, Chawla said, submitting a list of them.

She cited earlier Supreme Court judgments to state that a question having two or more corrects answers should be considered as incorrect.

Chawla has asked the court to direct the UPSC to release the answer key to the prelims examination and also set up an expert committee to examine this year’s papers.