CLAT-PG 2025 answer key row: Delhi HC orders revised results soon
In its ruling, though the court refused to quash the levy of ₹1,000 fee for raising objection to the answer key, it directed the consortium to consider revising the fees in the future examination.
The Delhi high court on Friday granted relief to postgraduate (PG) candidates of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) over alleged errors in the answer keys released by the National Law Universities (consortium), and directed the consortium to expeditiously declare revised results of this year’s courses.
Dealing with a batch of pleas challenging the CLAT PG results – declared on December 7 – a bench of chief justice DK Upadhyay and justice Tushar Rao Gedela rejected the answers of two out of the three disputed questions released by the consortium and upheld the answer of one.
To be sure, initially the three pleas filed by the candidates challenged eight questions but the consortium, in its meeting held in April, withdrew four. However, pursuant to court reserving the verdict, the consortium informed the high court about withdrawing another question after the candidate’s lawyer pointed out that the correct option published in the question paper distributed to candidates was different from the option given in the master booklet made by the consortium. With this withdrawal, the court only had to adjudicate on three disputed questions.
In its ruling, though the court refused to quash the levy of ₹1,000 fee for raising objection to the answer key, it directed the consortium to consider revising the fees in the future examination and asked it to place the matter before its grievance redressal committee headed by former judge and National Judicial Academy director G Raghuram.
“There has to be a fine balance which needs to be resolved between two sets of, what appears to be, genuine grievances. On one hand, while comparing the fee charged for objected questions by other organisations/institutions of national level with that charged by the consortium appears to be excessive and disproportionate, while appreciating the concerns of the consortium which too does not appear to be fanciful or imaginative, rather appears to be a measure which may be required in order to keep frivolous individuals and more so, the coaching institutes at bay. It would also be relevant to note that the time and efforts spent and made by the subject matter experts or the oversight review committee and the consortium as a whole in resolving these objections, in case they are in large number, frivolous, may entail huge, unnecessary and avoidable delay and/or protraction of the admission process, affecting or impacting the academic schedule too,” the court order read.
It added, “Notwithstanding the above observations, and keeping in mind that most of the candidates have already paid such fees, quashing such levy at this point in time may entail obstacles which may be unnecessary and may result in litigations which are not required. However, we expect that the aforesaid observations would be sufficient for the Consortium to take heed of and take appropriate steps to avoid such excessive fee in the next examinations, scheduled for the following years.”
The petitions came up for hearing before the high court after the Supreme Court transferred various pleas challenging UG and PG CLAT results, declared on December 7, before multiple high courts, including the Delhi HC. To avoid conflicting rulings, a bench led by former Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and justices Sanjay Kumar and KV Viswanathan on February 6 transferred pleas pending before various HCs, including those of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Calcutta, Bombay, Punjab & Haryana, to Delhi.
On April 23, the Delhi HC bench led by chief justice DK Upadhyay directed the NLU consortium to publish within four weeks the revised UG results by updating the mark sheet and re-notifying the final list of selected candidates, which was then stayed by the Supreme Court on April 30. On May 7, the Supreme Court pulled up the consortium for setting questions in the most “casual manner”, and directed changes in the marking pattern of six questions. The bench noted that in some questions, the answer key issued by the consortium was contrary to past Supreme Court judgments and in one question, the answer required students to make calculations that could not be expected in an objective test on legal reasoning.
Following the Supreme Court’s order, the consortium on May 17 modified the final answer key by withdrawing five questions in Logical Reasoning and two questions in Quantitative Techniques. “Accordingly, the evaluation of candidates for the CLAT 2025 UG shall be out of 113 marks instead of the originally announced 120 marks,” the notification stated. The registration for the counselling commenced from May 17.
The high court’s ruling, will have a significant impact on more than 10,000 students who had appeared for the CLAT PG examination and also fast track the admissions, the process of which was halted in light of the petitions. The counselling was initially scheduled to begin in December.
