The Allahabad High Court has ruled that multiple-choice questions containing more than one correct answer must be excluded from answer evaluation when candidates are required to select only one option. The court directed the Uttar Pradesh Education Service Selection Commission to remove two questions from the Uttar Pradesh Teacher Eligibility Test (UPTET) 2026 and recalculate the affected candidates' scores.
The ruling comes as a relief for candidates who had challenged the evaluation process after failing to meet the qualifying marks by a narrow margin. The court made it clear that the benefit of removing defective questions must be extended equally to all candidates, regardless of which answer they selected.
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Justice Vinod Diwakar delivered the judgment while hearing a petition filed by four applicants who appeared for the primary-level UPTET examination on July 3, 2026.
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The controversy arose over Questions 36 and 37 in the examination's Master Set, when the commission published the the final answer key along with the results on August 26, it identified two correct answers for each of these questions.
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For Question 36, both options B and D were treated as correct, while options A and D were accepted for Question 37. However, marks were awarded only to candidates who selected one of the recognised answers, leaving others without credit.
The four petitioners had secured marks ranging from 80.40104 to 81.39740, falling slightly below the required qualifying score of 82 marks. None of them had selected the options subsequently recognised as correct by the Commission.
Challenging the evaluation process, the candidates argued that a question designed to have a single correct answer becomes defective when the examining authority acknowledges that multiple options are valid.
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They maintained that awarding marks only to those who selected either of the accepted answers created an unfair advantage, as candidates were originally instructed to choose just one correct option.
During the proceedings, the petitioners modified their request and sought either the removal of both disputed questions from the evaluation or award equal marks to all candidates, irrespective of their response.
The commission opposed the petition, arguing that the candidates had neither marked the accepted options nor raised objections when the provisional answer key was released.
However, the High Court distinguished the dispute from an ordinary disagreement over the answer key. It observed that the problem arose because the examining authority had acknowledged the existence of two correct answers for questions intended to have only one.
The court considered the Commission's treatment of Question 38 in the same examination, which had been excluded from evaluation.
Referring to earlier Supreme Court judgments concerning examination evaluation, the High Court observed that removing defective questions was an appropriate solution where the question format required one answer but multiple options were found to be correct.
However, the court clarified that the revised evaluation would not automatically entitle candidates appointment or selection in a subsequent teacher recruitment process.
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