Chandigarh: Punjab and Haryana high court has dismissed 16 petitions challenging the 2025 final answer key and screening test result for the recruitment of assistant professors (geography) in Haryana, holding that repetition of questions from an examination conducted by Bihar Public Service Commission does not vitiate a competitive examination.Justice Harpreet Singh Brar recently held that there was no material to show that any candidate had prior access to the question paper or gained an unfair advantage. The bench also upheld the Haryana commission’s decision to change answers to six questions and delete 10 questions on the recommendations of subject experts.The petitions filed by Brahampal and others sought correction of the final answer key, re-evaluation of the OMR sheets of all candidates and publication of a revised result and merit list.The petitioners, through counsels senior advocates Puneet Bali and RK Malik, with advocates Sarthak Gupta and Sandeep Dhull, contended that 30 questions in the Haryana test were identical to those asked in Bihar Public Service Commission examination for the same post on April 29, 2025, around two months before the Haryana examination. It was further argued that 46 out of the 100 questions were in dispute, as the commission had deleted 10 questions and changed the answers to six others in the final answer key. The petitioners maintained that answers to six questions in the provisional answer key were correct and that changing them caused prejudice to candidates.Haryana commission, through counsels Kanwal Goyal and Harpriya Khaneka, submitted that petitioners participated in the screening test without any protest and none of them could clear it.“The changes in the answer key, including the deletion of questions, were made after thorough scrutiny by the subject experts. No allegation of mala fides, arbitrariness or discrimination has been levelled against them. Further, all such changes were uniformly applied to all the candidates,” submitted the commission.“…to allay the doubts of the candidates, the representations received against the final answer key were again reviewed by the subject experts. The experts reported that no change was required…”, argued the commission before the HC.On the deletion of questions, the commission submitted that the questions were excluded for all candidates and the marks secured by each candidate were converted from marks out of 90 to marks out of 100. It argued that the exercise treated all candidates equally.The HC held that evaluation of answers in a competitive examination falls within the domain of academic experts and that judicial interference is limited to cases where an answer key is demonstrably wrong.“The court does not sit in appeal over the opinion of subject experts on the correctness of an answer key. It interferes only where the key is shown to be demonstrably wrong, without any inferential process of reasoning,” the Bench observed.The bench concluded that repetition of questions did not vitiate the screening test held on June 8, 2025.The HC held that the final answer key, the announcement rejecting the representations and the screening test result did not suffer from any demonstrable error, arbitrariness or mala fides. It also found no violation of Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution.Dismissing all 16 petitions as devoid of merit, the HC vacated any interim orders passed in the cases.
