In a significant legal intervention concerning the Uttar Pradesh Teacher Eligibility Test 2026, the Allahabad High Court has directed the examining authority to exclude two disputed questions from the final evaluation. This judicial order directly alters the scoring framework for hundreds of thousands of teaching aspirants across the state. Candidates who narrowly missed the qualifying cut-off mark by just a fraction of a point now stand to see their qualification status re-evaluated under a revised marking system.
Origin of the Answer Key Dispute in Master Question Paper
The primary level UPTET examination was administered by the Uttar Pradesh Education Service Selection Commission on 3 July, followed by the declaration of official results on 26 August. The controversy surfaced immediately after the release of the final answer key. Candidates raised strong objections regarding question number 36 and question number 37 in the master set. In its final answer key, the commission treated two separate options as correct for each of these two questions. Accepting multiple contradictory options within an objective multiple-choice format compromised the objectivity and reliability of the evaluation process.
Why Affected Candidates Approached the High Court
During the tabulation of scores, the commission awarded credit exclusively to candidates who had marked either of the two recognized choices. Candidates who refrained from attempting the questions due to confusing choices, or who selected another alternative, received no credit. As a direct consequence, numerous candidates belonging to the general and OBC categories fell short of the passing benchmark of 82 marks by merely one to one-and-a-half marks and were classified as unsuccessful. Seeking legal redress against this scoring method, Vijay Sonkar along with other aggrieved candidates approached the Allahabad High Court.
Justice Vinod Diwakar on Objective Testing Integrity
While presiding over the case, Justice Vinod Diwakar observed that whenever an examining body itself validates two conflicting answers for a single multiple-choice question, the fundamental utility of that question ceases to exist. Such ambiguous questions lose their core capability to distinguish between qualified and unqualified candidates. To protect the constitutional right to equality among all test participants, the court directed the testing authority to strike out both contentious questions from the evaluation pool.
Framework for the Revised Scorecard and Qualification Rules
Under the directive issued by the High Court, the total marks for the UPTET paper will now be scaled down from 150 to 148. The qualifying pass percentages will subsequently be computed on this adjusted base of 148 marks. The commission has been instructed to recalculate the marks of all affected candidates and issue updated scorecards. The court further clarified that clearing the examination and securing a passing certificate serves purely as an eligibility credential, and it does not confer an automatic right to securing a government teaching post.
