CLAT 2025: Delhi High Court finds errors in 2 questions; orders NLU Consortium to revise the results

The Delhi High Court has directed the Consortium of National Law Universities to announce revised results after making changes in the award of marks with regard to two questions in the recently held Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2025 undergraduate exam for admission to 5-year LLB course [Aditya Singh (Minor) vs Consortium Of National Law Universities].Justice Jyoti Singh directed the Consortium to make corrections with regard to question numbers 14 and 100 in Set A of the CLAT exam paper, after hearing a petition challenging the answer key. “The errors in question Nos.14 and 100 are demonstrably clear and shutting a blind eye to the same would be injustice to the petitioner albeit this Court is conscious of the fact that it may impact the result of other candidates,” the Court said..Accordingly, the Court directed that the benefit be extended to all the candidates who had written option ‘C’ against question 14 in Set A."Since Court has upheld option ‘C’ as the correct answer, which was also the view of the Expert Committee, benefit cannot be restricted only to the petitioner and will extend to all candidates who have opted for option ‘C’," the Court ordered.As regards question 100, the Court directed that the same be excluded.“Question number 100 will be excluded as correctly advised by the Expert Committee and the result will be accordingly revised,” it further ordered.The Court in its judgment also noted that while the Supreme Court has cautioned that the Constitutional courts must exercise great restraint in such matters and should be reluctant to entertain a plea challenging the correctness of the key answers, they can interfere in cases where there are blatant errors in questions/ answer key."Therefore, the law does not commend a total ‘hands off’ approach and in exceptional cases where questions are found to be demonstrably wrong, the resultant injustice to a candidate must be redressed and undone," the Court said..The order was passed on a petition filed by 17-year old candidate, Aditya Singh (petitioner), who had appeared for CLAT 2025 undergraduate exam.Singh sought quashing of the final answer-key declared by the Consortium, stating that the answers to few questions were wrong.He also sought a stay of on counselling process..It was the petitioner's case that after the Consortium released a provisional answer key, he had sent objections to some answers. However, the final answer key released after considering the objections, repeated the same mistakes, the petition stated. Thereafter, Singh filed his grievances as per the grievance redressal mechanism set up by the Consortium.However, the Consortium proceeded to conduct counselling process without resolving the issue..The petitioner claimed that the due to the error in the answer key, he lost marks, which prejudiced his admission prospects.The candidate submitted that if his objections had been properly adjudicated, then he could have secured a higher rank and qualified for admission to a more prestigious institution..The candidate also sought directions to the Consortium to constitute an expert committee to consider the objections raised by him and reassess his marks and ranking..Advocates Dhanesh Relan, Arjeet Gaur, Barinda Batra, Atul Kanti Tripathi, Suryansh Jamwal and Sachin Sharma appeared for the minor candidate.Senior Advocate Sandeep Sethi with advocates Arun Srikumar, AK Trivedi, Ram Shankar, Yash Jagra, Shubhansh Thakur and Shreya Sethi appeared for the Consortium..[Read Judgment]