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A civil services exam is far from a breeze. Its intent is destruction. There has always been an unwritten agreement between the Union Public Service Commission and the millions of desperate young people who give up their space in a tiny room to study. You read the syllabus, they test you on the syllabus.
That contract seems to have been in the trash during preliminary examination in 2023. The aspirants had come to the testing centres to take the Civil Services Aptitude Test (Paper-II) which included a typical logical reasoning and basic arithmetic question paper. They were walking as if they had seen a ghost. The math questions were mean and meaner. The candidates began to immediately gripe that the paper has been “stolen” from IIT-JEE or the Common Admission Test (CET) for the top management institutes. It was bizarre.
Those who had been preparing for years on the Constitution and economic surveys were suddenly disqualified from the race since they failed to solve advanced mathematical permutations within less than two minutes.
The rage didn’t remain confined to internet forums. It spilled into the legal system. A bunch of unsuccessful candidates appealed to court. They said that the paper had a number of questions, about eleven in fact, which were entirely beyond the official syllabus. Their whole attempt was spoiled by that one paper. They demanded justice and the judiciary to reset one of the largest recruitment on the planet.
A Legal Maze Through the Tribunal
The battle was not at the High Court. It’s not service law in this country. The first step for the angry aspirants was to approach the Central Administrative Tribunal with their grievances.
Their initial requests asked for a wholesale revision of the results. They have asked the tribunal to cancel the bizarre questions, rework the entire cut-off and release a new merit list. If this was not possible, then they wanted an additional compensation “attempt” or age relaxation at the end of the year, to compensate for the loss.
The tribunal saw all the chaos and basically rolled their eyes. In late 2024, the tribunal dismissed the plea. They said that their job, to do a highly specialised examination, cannot be reviewed by a judge without first passing through a highly specialised examination process and being given a grade by the judge. The tribunal seemed to be unsure how such a bizarre and arbitrary legal maneuver would benefit the plaintiffs, particularly because thousands of other people had been able to take the same test on the same severe examination and have passed.
The aspirants were not satisfied with that. They took the issue up to the next level. They had filed a writ petition, which was registered as W.P.(C) 4354/2025, right in the Delhi High Court. They requested the constitutional court to set aside the ruling of the tribunal and finally get the recruitment agency to take the responsibility of what they saw as a rogue question paper.
This is a Defense of the Thought Provoking Math.This is a Defense of the Thought Provoking Math.
The Union Public Service Commission flew in its big guns to the High Court. They completely denied playing dirty.
As the government lawyers opened fire on the procedural obstacles before addressing issue questions. They showed him a very obvious mistake in his petition. The court, if it does actually rewrite the merit list for 2023, is going to immediately put the careers of all the candidates who had successfully passed the mains and cleared the interview and even have a training academy at their homes at risk. The petitioners have completely omitted to have such successful candidates as parties to the suit. It is not possible to nuke someone’s job without first affording them the opportunity to defend him or herself in court.
Then there was the defense of the test. The commission announced they hadn’t only ignored the outcry. It appears that they had actually established an Expert Committee to specially look into the eleven controversial questions raised by the angry students.
The committee attended the material and rejected completely the out of bounds idea in the paper. The experts were of the opinion that the questions were directly related to the syllabus. Commission counsel told the bench the questions were just “thought-provoking. They said mathematics problems needed certain kinds of mental agility and analytical skills that were needed by future district magistrates and diplomats. Simply put, the test was difficult because the job is difficult.
The agency also gave the petitioners a jolt to the system with regards to their timing. They claimed that the candidates sat for the exam without making a noise, took their chance and began to shout when they checked their roll number was not there in the results pdf.
The problem of Infructuous Reliefs
Justices Anil Kshetarpal and Amit Mahajan listened to the arguments. They were forced to determine whether or not the High Court should serve as the ultimate examiner of the nation’s most challenging test.
They checked the date on the calendar. The period was all in favour of the petitioners. The exam was a controversial one that occurred in May 2023. The primary exam was completed months later. The final results were already available. However, worse than that, the machine of bureaucracy had been continuing to operate. The recruitment cycle is completed in 2024. The 2025 exam cycle was another one that went down in the history books as well.
The bench was blunt with it. They made it clear that the constitutional courts did not have the writ jurisdiction simply to provide fruitless reliefs. An egg is not unscrammable 3 years later.
To attempt to remove the eleven questions from a question paper of three years back would create absolute chaos in the administrative machinery! It would impact on the seniority of officers who have developed their careers.It would be a nuisance to the seniority and training of officers who have already gone on with their careers. The judges pointed out to the question paper the Expert Committee’s clean chit and did not want to second guess the academic experts.
