Allahabad High Court restores CLAT-UG 2026 answer key, rules judicial review in academic matters is narrow

A division bench of the Allahabad High Court has set aside a single judge's direction to revise the CLAT-UG 2026 merit list, holding that the Consortium of National Law Universities' two-tier expert review of the answer key cannot be displaced unless a manifest error is shown on the face of the record.

The Allahabad High Court has set aside a single judge's direction that had partly altered the CLAT-UG 2026 final answer key, holding that the Consortium of National Law Universities' two-tier expert review process cannot be displaced unless a candidate shows a manifest error on the face of the record. A division bench of Justices Saumitra Dayal Singh and Swarupama Chaturvedi allowed the Consortium's intra-court Special Appeal and dismissed the writ petitioner's connected appeal, restoring the answer key as finalised on 16 December 2025.

The dispute traced back to a single objection candidate, a minor who appeared at a Ghaziabad centre and challenged Question Nos. 6, 9 and 13 of Set-C in the law-school entrance exam taken by 75,009 candidates on 7 December 2025. After the Consortium's Subject Expert Committees and Oversight Committee declined to alter the provisional key, the candidate approached the High Court under Article 226. On 3 February 2026, a single judge accepted the challenge for Question No. 9 of Set-C and directed that both options ‘B’ and ‘D’ be treated as correct, with a corresponding revision of the merit list for later rounds of counselling. Admissions already concluded in the first round were protected.

Both sides appealed. The Consortium argued the single judge had crossed the narrow boundary that governs judicial review of academic evaluation. The candidate argued the relief should have extended to Questions 6 and 13 as well. While admitting the appeals, the division bench on 20 February 2026 stayed the merit-list revision and gave the candidate provisional admission at National Law University, Sonipat, subject to outcome.

The narrow gateway under Article 226

Justice Swarupama Chaturvedi, writing for the bench, framed the question in terms of three Supreme Court rulings that govern this terrain. The first is Ran Vijay Singh v. State of U.P., (2018) 2 SCC 357. The bench relied on its conclusions that re-evaluation can be permitted only if a material error is shown “very clearly, without any inferential process of reasoning or by a process of rationalization” in rare or exceptional cases, that the court must presume the correctness of key answers, and that in case of doubt the benefit goes to the examination authority rather than the candidate.

The second is Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission v. Rahul Singh, (2018) 7 SCC 254. The bench drew on the rule that the onus lies on the candidate to demonstrate that the key answer is a glaring mistake totally apparent on its face, and that constitutional courts must show great restraint because judges cannot take on the role of experts in academic subjects.

The third is Siddhi Sandeep Ladda v. Consortium of National Law Universities, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 1144 — a CLAT case in which the Supreme Court did interfere, but only after observing that the threshold for intervention is reached when academicians themselves act in a manner that adversely affects the career aspirations of lakhs of students.

From these, the bench distilled a working test: judicial review is not excluded in academic evaluation, but it is confined to examining whether the decision-making behind the final answer key suffers from manifest error. A court cannot conduct an exercise of alternative interpretation of questions.

Three questions, three answers held plausible

The bench then went through each disputed question and tested it against that standard. Question 6 of Set-C, drawn from a verbal-reasoning passage about transformations of the word “ELECTROCARDIOGRAPH”, asked which letter is prefixed to the word after the first half of the letters is reversed. The petitioner read that step in isolation; the examiner's answer (Option B, “P”) followed from a holistic, sequential reading of all transformations specified in the passage. The bench found the examiner's reading consistent with the passage's express requirement that candidates follow each condition in the exact order, and held there was no error in the key.

Question 9 of Set-C, the question on which the single judge had intervened, was a logical-deduction problem framed around the theft of a fictional “Sunburst Medallion”. Three suspects were named; one of them, Bharat, was said to have a confirmed alibi between 8:00 PM and 1:30 AM. The question asked which established fact must necessarily be incorrect if Bharat is hypothesised to be the thief. The examiner's answer was Option (D) — the time-frame of his alibi. The bench held that this was the only option that, on settled principles of deductive reasoning, must be falsified if the hypothesis holds. The Oversight Committee's contrary view, the bench wrote, “fails to appreciate this necessity to eliminate all true facts” and was unsustainable. Crucially, this was the question on which the single judge had directed that both options ‘B’ and ‘D’ be treated as correct.

Question 13 of Set-C, drawing from the same factual matrix, asked what condition was necessary for a different suspect, Chitra, to have stolen the medallion. Chitra was at a graphic-design studio from 7:00 PM to 11:45 PM; the theft occurred between 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM. The bench held that the only logically necessary condition for her involvement is the timing condition in Option (C) — that the theft occurred after she left the studio and before 1:00 AM. Other options were relevant but not necessary in the strict logical sense.

Why the single judge's order did not survive

The bench was careful to record that the single judge's order was well-intentioned. But it identified two structural problems with the way that order had reached its conclusion on Question 9.

First, the Consortium's process for finalising the key is not a single-step exercise. After provisional publication, objections are referred to subject-wise Expert Committees; their findings are then reviewed by an Oversight Committee, which can reject or accept proposed modifications. The bench accepted, on the Consortium's supplementary affidavit, that these committees are formed each year by the CLAT Convenor under powers delegated by the Executive Committee through Clauses 7.3.5, 7.3.7 and 13.3 of the Consortium's bye-laws. The structure produces, in the bench's words, a strong presumption of correctness in academic matters that can be displaced only by clear and demonstrable error.

Second, what the single judge had done amounted to substituting his own deductive answer for the Consortium's. The bench held that even where two views on a question are possible, the academic authority's plausible view must ordinarily prevail. To accept multiple options as correct simply because a court reads the question differently is to run into the very rule against alternative interpretation that Ran Vijay Singh warns against.

The bench also noted that the candidate had not pressed the territorial-jurisdiction objection on appeal, which had been one strand of the Consortium's challenge to the writ petition being entertained in Allahabad in the first place.

Order

Special Appeal No. 135 of 2026, filed by the Consortium, was allowed and the single judge's order of 3 February 2026 was set aside. Special Appeal No. 137 of 2026, filed by the writ petitioner, was dismissed. The bench made no order as to costs.

The practical effect is that the CLAT-UG 2026 final answer key as published on 16 December 2025 stands restored. The merit-list revision contemplated by the single judge will not be carried out. The provisional admission granted to the writ petitioner at National Law University, Sonipat, on 20 February 2026 was expressly subject to the outcome of the appeal, and now reverts to that status.