Two Ambiguous UPTET Questions Must Be Dropped and Scores Recomputed, Rules Allahabad High Court

Two Ambiguous UPTET Questions Must Be Dropped and Scores Recomputed, Rules Allahabad High Court in Vijay Sonkar and Others v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Others

Case: Vijay Sonkar and Others v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Others
Date of Judgment: 28 October 2026
Court: Allahabad High Court
Coram: Justice Vinod Diwakar

Court Observation

“The method rests on the fortuity of a choice made on a question incapable of a single correct answer.”

Summary

The Allahabad High Court has directed the Uttar Pradesh Education Service Selection Commission to exclude Questions 36 and 37 from the evaluation of the Uttar Pradesh Teacher Eligibility Test, 2026, after the Commission’s own final answer key accepted two correct options for each question. The examination must therefore be treated as comprising 148 questions instead of 150, with the qualifying standard recalculated at the prescribed percentages on that basis.

The Court held that awarding marks only to candidates who happened to select one of the two accepted answers was unsustainable, since candidates cannot be rewarded or penalised on the basis of a question that admits no single unambiguous answer. The Court also noted that the Commission had already dropped Question 38 from the same paper, and there was no intelligible basis for treating the two disputed questions differently.

Key Holdings

  • Where a question admits more than one correct answer, the evaluation method of crediting only candidates who chose one of the accepted options cannot be sustained.
  • The proper course in such a case is to exclude the ambiguous questions from evaluation and recalculate the qualifying standard on the reduced total.
  • Relief of this kind must be extended uniformly to all similarly placed candidates, not confined to those who approached the Court.

Directions Issued

  • The Commission was directed to recompute the petitioners’ scores and to correct their results and scorecards wherever necessary.
  • The benefit of the revised evaluation must be extended uniformly to all similarly situated candidates.

Background

Vijay Sonkar and three other candidates challenged the evaluation of Questions 36 and 37 in the UPTET 2026 final answer key. For Question 36, options B and D were treated as correct, while options A and D were accepted for Question 37. The four petitioners had been declared unsuccessful in the results announced on 26 August 2026, with normalised scores just below the qualifying mark of 82, and they sought marks for the two disputed questions. The Court instead directed exclusion of both questions and a fresh computation for all similarly placed candidates, while clarifying that revised results would not automatically confer any right to appointment or selection in subsequent recruitment processes.

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Disclaimer: This is a summary prepared for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should refer to the official judgment for the authoritative text.

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