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NEW DELHI: After resisting for years against disclosing of answer key immediately after the preliminary examination to allow students to raise objections on incorrect questions and answers , UPSC has now given in to students’ demands and told the Supreme Court that it decided to publish provisional answer key after the exam “to enhance transparency in its functioning” and will also entertain objections of candidates on discrepancies in exam paper.In an affidavit filed in the apex court on a batch of civil services aspirants from across the country, the commission said that its decision would address the grievances of candidates. The petitioners, including Vidushi Pandey from Uttrakhand, moved the court seeking its direction to UPSC to make public the answer key immediately after the exam and before declaring results, so that candidates can raise objections and errors can be corrected in time. At present the key is published after final examination after almost a year after and virtually shuts the door for candidates to seek any remedy for any fault in the question paper.”That as a consequence of comprehensive deliberation and considering the pious role assigned to the UPSC as a constitutional body, the commission has arrived at a conscious and well considered decision as under: a) Publishing the Provisional Answer key, after the Preliminary Examination is conducted. b) Representations/objections will be sought from the candidates who appeared in the examination. Each such representation/objection should be supported by three authoritative sources….,” the affidavit said.The students have been fighting the legal battle for the last two years and though the Commission has initially strongly objected their plea but it finally relented after senior advocate Jaideep Gupta, who was appointed by SC as amicus curiae, told the court that greater transparency was needed in the examination process and suggested that a provisional answer key should be published a day after the examination and examinees should be allowed to file objections to the questions as well as to the answers within a week.”The current practice of providing the answer key to the preliminary examination after the final examination is completed does provide a modicum of transparency in as much as if it is found that egregious errors have crept in at the stage of the preliminary examination, the Court is not powerless to give appropriate directions,” Gupta told the apex court and favoured students plea.Alleging that a single wrong answer could alter a candidate’s fate in the prestigious exam, the petitioners mentioned faulty model answers given by UPSC in 2021 and 2023 exams and sought SC’s intervention.”There is no way of knowing as to on what basis, the evaluation and shortlisting of the candidates were done. It would transpire from the examinations conducted in the previous years that the candidates were selected in the preliminary examination on the basis of wrong answers and when the Answer keys was disclosed, after completion of the entire selection process, it was already too late for those, who despite having given the correct answer and were declared unsuccessful candidates, to raise any objection or lodge any effective protest,” the petition said.
