: The Delhi High Court has quashed the result of Delhi Judicial Service (DJS) preliminary examination of 2015, while directing the HC’s administration to re-compute the marks and prepare a new eligibility list after deleting four questions, on which objections were raised.
Partly allowing the writ petitions filed by two candidates, a Division Bench said on Monday that the answers to four questions in the multiple choice paper were incorrect. The court, which had earlier postponed the DJS mains written examination — scheduled for May 14 and 15 — directed the High Court's Registrar General to fix a suitable date for holding the exam.
The DJS exam is held for recruitment of Civil Judges and Metropolitan Magistrates in the trial courts of the Capital. The Bench, comprising Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Najmi Waziri, held that in the instances where the answer key was incorrect or more than one key to the answer could be correct, the candidates should not be penalised.
Petitioners Sumit Kumar and Manish Gupta, who were unsuccessful in the examination, had alleged that the question paper contained ambiguous questions and four questions had more than one correct answer as an option.
In its 23-page judgment, the court said the new dates for the mains exam should be fixed in a manner ensuring that the newly added eligible candidates are given sufficient time to prepare for the mains written exam.
While Mr. Gupta’s petition had challenged the answer key on the ground of its ambiguity, Mr. Kumar had stated that there were some “fundamental errors” in some of the exam questions.
The High Court itself had invited objections after releasing the answer key and acknowledged certain errors. It later issued a revised key, which revealed ambiguities in 13 questions, according to Mr. Kumar.
