New Delhi: Shravan Pandey was distraught when the results of the ‘mains’ examination of the Uttar Pradesh judicial service civil judge – junior division – were declared in July-August 2023.
“I was devastated. I had put in a lot of effort and expected to clear the exam,” said the 28-year-old from Nainital. The mains examination for the 2022 judicial services’ junior division civil judge posts were conducted in May 2023.
Little did Pandey know then that his personal disappointment and quest to scrutinise his evaluation would lead the Allahabad high court to uncover a number of discrepancies and irregularities in the way judicial exams were being conducted in the state.
In December 2024, after six months of legal hearings, a high court bench of Justice Donadi Ramesh and Justice S.D. Singh ordered an independent commission to probe the irregularities in the 2022 judicial exam and suggest ways to improve its quality. The court appointed Justice Govind Mathur, former chief justice of the Allahabad high court, to lead the commission.
Over 50,000 candidates had appeared for the initial preliminary examination. Over 3,100 candidates qualified for the main written examination, which was cleared by 302 candidates. The main exams were held in the final week of May 2023.
In August, 2023 the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission (UPPSC), which organises these examinations, released a list of the selected candidates. The marks scored by the applicants were put out into the public domain in November.
Pandey found that he had scored a total of 480 marks in six papers, falling short of the cut-off mark for an interview by just three marks.
The six papers he had appeared for were English Language, Hindi Language, General Knowledge, and three papers of Law.
Unhappy with the result and after not getting any response from the UPPSC, he decided to file a Right to Information application in January 2024, seeking more details about his performance. More than two months later, he was provided with a note on how his marks had been distributed across the six papers. He was informed that he received 47 marks out of 100 in English Language and just 26 in Hindi Language. This did not sit well with Pandey, who felt he had done better than this on exam day.
“I was not satisfied with my marks in either of the language papers,” he said.
Later, Pandey would learn that he had in fact scored 63 and not 47 in English. These 16 marks could have easily put him beyond the qualifying mark for the interview.
In April, 2024 he filed another RTI query to access the answer sheets of the six papers he had appeared for.
On May 25, 2024, he was provided the answer sheets. What he found astounded him – the handwriting in the English Language paper was not his own.
“The paper I was shown was someone else’s copy but with the same marks that I was shown to have got – 47,” said Pandey.
He also found that his answers in the Hindi Language answer sheet were scored off in the last three or four pages.
He decided to take it up legally and filed a writ petition in the Allahabad high court. Pandey prayed that his answer sheets be re-evaluated and his result be redrawn. He also demanded that the final result of the exam issued on August 31, 2023, be quashed or as an alternative, he be permitted to appear for the interview.
“It seemed a little suspicious to me,” he said while talking to The Wire on January 16.
“It was a weird feeling to come to terms with. I was clueless. I wanted to give them (UPPSC) the benefit of the doubt, that some sort of error had crept in,” he said.
Also read: More Cancellations, Over 50 Lakhs Affected, Cloud Over Boards Too: The Uttar Pradesh Exam Story
UPPSC ‘takes steps to maintain anonymity’
But as things unfolded, there was no room for doubt left in anyone’s mind that this was more than a stray case of error. In June, the high court directed the UPPSC to produce before it the answer sheets of all six papers so that it could compare Pandey’s handwriting.
The UPPCS submitted a written document in court saying that it had taken certain steps in order to maintain the anonymity of the candidates. And while taking those steps, some mistakes might have occurred.
Pandey’s paper might have got exchanged with the paper of some other candidate due to an inadvertent exchange of the fake codes pasted on the bundles of the answer sheets, the UPPCS said then. The body also said that the system of giving a fake roll number was a fool proof method of keeping the secrecy of the candidatures of the various candidates.
Sunil Kumar, deputy secretary, UPPSC, then submitted in court in a sealed cover an inquiry report of the internal committee constituted by the UPPSC to examine the discrepancies in the conduct of the examination. The inquiry disclosed that the “check list of master fake codes” pasted on two bundles of 25 answer booklets each of the English Language paper, got interchanged. This led to the “blunderous mistake,” said the high court.
Not just Pandey’s paper, the UPPSC admitted similar errors in preparing the merit list of the written exams with respect to 49 other candidates.
According to the UPPSC, the checklist of master fake codes pasted on two bundles of the answer books for the English Language paper got interchanged. While preparing the merit list of the written examination, the marks of one set of 25 candidates got interchanged with the marks of another set of 25 candidates.
This opened the pandora’s box and other candidates too came up with their individual grievances.
Both sets of candidates unhappy
At this stage, there appeared two broad types of disputes before the court. One set of aggrieved candidates were those who scored zero or were awarded less marks for answers that they correctly answered. The other candidates were aggrieved that the original marks awarded to them were reduced later after being corrected in an unauthorised manner.
UPPSC officials maintained that other than the “mistake” of the interchange of the check list of master fake codes of two bundles of 25 answer booklets of the English Language paper, no other mistake had been made.
However, 19 candidates filed different petitions raising objections to the marks allotted to them. The court also took note of a separate petition filed by one Shivam Singh who had correctly answered a question but was not awarded any marks for it. Singh had correctly answered that table tennis player Achanta Sharath had received the Major Shyam Chand Khel Ratna Award 2022.
The court also underlined the issue of faulty totalling of the marks and inconsistent marking standards. It referred to the case of Janhavi, who had appeared in the UPPCS (J)-2018 examination and challenged it in court. She said that she had earned 88 marks in the English paper but was wrongly awarded only 86. According to her, she had received 23 marks for her answer to question number 2. The examiner had also awarded her those marks but wrongly totalled it to 21 marks.
During the course of the court proceedings, Pandey and others, who had been wrongly kept out of the initial merit list, got called for the interview as the UPPSC tried to unilaterally rectify matters. Pandey did not clear the interview.
Also read: 48 Lakh Aspirants For 67,000 Jobs: How Uttar Pradesh Conducted the Constable Recruitment Exam
‘We accept our fate’
While the entire process initially dampened his spirits, it ultimately fuelled a change in his career path, as he has now started pursuing litigation. His experience also “opened his eyes” to how candidates trust the Commission so much that they do not even bother to check their own papers.
“We trust them blindly. We don’t question them. We accept our fate,” he said. The lesson he got from his ordeal was to “not trust the process completely” and “to not leave things to others.”
In a detailed order on December 20, 2024, the high court noted that general practices and procedures of the UPPSC required reform or upgradation to ensure standardised and wholly credible evaluation procedures.
The process of evaluation of answer booklets and declaration of results needs to be reformed to make it more responsive and credible, both in the eyes of the court as also the society, in general, the bench said.
The high court also observed that the inter-change of the checklist of the master fake code was an “impermissible blunder.” The fact that it has been rectified upon objections raised by Pandey “indicates lack or failure of internal audit mechanism,” the judges said.
The court also pointed out a number of other deficiencies in the judicial exams. Multiple corrections in marks were made in many answer booklets by examiners without indicating any objective reasoning. Some of them included overwriting by examiners while in other cases, marks first allotted were cancelled.
“At present, it is not clear, if such and more mistakes had been committed as may also have been corrected by the Commission, later. In any case, such events hit at the credibility of public examinations involving public trust in institutions such as the Commission. Such occurrence should be minimised, if not eliminated,” the court said.
The judges also stressed that “every such bad experience should lead to more serious internal audit and more detailed combing to learn from each such mistake and make the system and process of the Commission more robust, creditworthy and transparent.”
Several issues
The entire episode taught Pandey the practical realities of litigation in the country. So much so that he now wants to channelise his energy towards litigation while pursuing a future in the higher judiciary. He has abandoned his aspiration of becoming a judge in the lower judiciary.
“I have stopped appearing for the lower judiciary exams,” he said.
During the case, the high court also found several issues with the quality of the questions in the judicial exam. The question papers, particularly in Law, were more theoretical than practical, said the court. The model answer key for the papers in Law appear to lean to test the theoretical knowledge of the candidates and they do not appear to lay emphasis on testing the ability of the candidates to analyse and reason – the basic attributes of a judge, the court said. The judges also said that the quality of the evaluation process and the evaluation made were not of desired quality.
The commission has been asked to suggest ways and means to make the evaluation process of UPPCS (J) Examination more responsive to the needs of the selection and more trustworthy for all stakeholders including the UPPSC.
Senior counsel S. Farman Naqvi and lawyer Shashwat Anand, appearing for Pandey in the high court, suggested that the Commission may also examine the feasibility of the high court itself conducting the judicial exam. The bench, however, declined that request, saying that the question needed to be addressed by the court on the administrative side and did not require a Commission.
The Commission has till May 1, 2025 to submit its report.
