Supreme Court stays Delhi HC order to revise undergraduate CLAT 2025 results
A bench headed by justice Bhushan R Gavai passed the order while hearing a petition by a candidate Siddhi Sandeep Ladda who appeared in the CLAT 2025
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed the Delhi high court order directing the consortium of national law universities to publish revised results of the undergraduate Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2025.
A bench headed by justice Bhushan R Gavai passed the order while hearing a petition filed by a candidate Siddhi Sandeep Ladda who appeared in the CLAT 2025 and had previously represented her case before the high court.
In its order of April 23, the high court scrutinised 17 questions and recommended changes in marks for four questions. One answer was changed while another was withdrawn. On the remaining questions, the high court awarded marks for one question to those who attempted while in the other question, candidates who received any of the three sets of question papers barring Set A were awarded grace marks.
The petitioner, who had received Set A question paper and stood at 22nd rank, argued that this amounted to discrimination and created an “artificial classification” in direct violation of Article 14 (right to equality) of the Constitution. Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan and advocate Soumik Ghosal appeared for the petitioner.
The bench, also comprising justice Augustine George Masih, posted the matter for hearing on Monday while issuing notice to the consortium. Hours after the order was passed, the consortium mentioned the matter before the same bench and said that the revision of marks was being carried out in pursuance to the high court order. Senior advocate Rajshekhar Rao informed the court that two questions where the high court had ordered withdrawal and change of answer, were challenged by six candidates.
The court said, “You inform everybody who has challenged that we will take up the matter on Monday. We need to hear them. You can put it on your website informing them about this petition.”
Sankaranarayanan submitted that the petitioner was at a disadvantage in getting Set A question paper since the high court discarded a question in other sets (B, C and D) due to a typographical error giving grace marks to even students who did not attempt the question, affecting the petitioner’s chances of getting a seat among the preferred national law universities (NLU).
The petition said, “There has been a deviation from uniform evaluation standards. Set A students are being evaluated on the basis of 115 questions, whereas Sets B, C, and D are effectively evaluated on 114 questions creating an unfair evaluative process where the Set A candidates were expected to solve an additional question.”
It was further stated that the high court judgment applied different standards for different questions, flagging the need for having uniform evaluation standards, particularly for competitive examinations such as CLAT, where a 0.25 percentile difference pushes the candidate down by 100 or 200 ranks.
“This constitutes not only procedural irregularity but also substantive injustice,” the petition said.
The high court order was passed by a bench of chief justice DK Upadhyay and justice Tushar Rao Gedela. The order also directed that a question be withdrawn, despite a single judge bench of the HC finding the question to be absolutely valid.
“In deciding that the question was out of syllabus, grave error has been committed,” the petition said, pointing out that the same tested “inferential and logical skills” of the students and required no prior legal knowledge. Moreover, many students had correctly answered the question and hence withdrawing the question was an erroneous decision, said the petition.
Faulting the judgment for adopting an unequal evaluative framework without appreciating the arguments of the successful candidates, the petition submitted, “Each of these vitiating elements undermines academic fairness, distorts the merit list, and raises grave constitutional and legal issues necessitating intervention by this court.”
