The high court said it cannot "examine or question the wisdom of the panel of experts that has prepared the question paper, and re-assess the relative merits of the questions". The Delhi High Court has dismissed a plea against an order of the Central Administrative Tribunal claiming that a “large number of questions” in the Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT) were “out of syllabus”, which forms part of the Civil Services Examination 2023 held in May. Referring to several judgments of the Supreme Court, a division bench of Justice V Kameswar Rao and Justice Anoop Kumar Mendirattura, in its August 22 order, observed, “The Tribunal had rightly observed that the said judgments restrain judicial bodies/fora from interfering with competitive selection processes merely on the ground that some of the candidates may have questioned the selection process or the syllabus of the examination, even though they had voluntarily participated in the examination”. The court said it cannot “examine or question the wisdom of the panel of experts that has prepared the question paper, and re-assess the relative merits of the questions”. It added that it cannot sit in appeal against the “considered decision of such a panel of academic experts, unless such decision is demonstrated to be manifestly arbitrary, malafide or illegal,” which was not the case in the petition. The petitioners’ (civil services aspirants/candidates) grievance was that the General Studies Paper-II or the CSAT, which forms one of the two papers in the preliminary examination, contains a large number of questions, which were not in accordance with the syllabus notified for the said examination. They said that CSAT/Paper-II is only qualifying in nature, however, the implications are that only those candidates who qualify in this paper, are considered for a position in merit on the basis of the marks obtained in Paper-I. “According to them, this essentially means that no matter how well they will perform in Paper-I, if they did not meet the qualifying marks prescribed for Paper-II, they would be virtually out of the competition. It was also represented that the qualifying marks in CSAT Paper-II are 33%,” the bench noted. “It was also elaborated by them before the Tribunal that the syllabus for the CSAT/Paper-II is supposed to be of Class X Level Arithmetic/ Mathematics, whereas a large number of questions asked in the said paper related to Commutation, Permutation and Combination, which is not a subject taught in Class X, and in fact the questions generally were those put forth to evaluate the candidates for admission in higher engineering institutions like IITs, etc,” the bench added. The petitioners said the paper was in “contravention to the syllabus” that was notified, and has severely impaired the prospects of the candidates to compete on their own merits in the Civil Services Examination without having to be subjected to discrimination, “as students with humanities background would face unreasonable disadvantage”. The petitioners argued that the UPSC, despite notifying the syllabus as Class X level Mathematics, had asked questions of Class XI & XII level. They said that the UPSC had contravened notification where they prescribed Class X syllabus for CSAT/Paper-II. The UPSC had said a committee of experts set up the question paper for CSAT and its wisdom and knowledge cannot be questioned in a legal forum through judicial review. The body further said that the qualifying marks of 33 per cent, was prescribed in accordance with rules governing the examination and hence the petitioner candidates cannot seek the change of the cut off percentage to 23 per cent for their convenience. Upholding the CAT’s order, the bench said the only ground set up by the petitioners to attack the question paper was that some questions were of Class XI & XII level. The bench said this decision on what questions will be in the paper and what should be the nature and complexion of such questions “necessarily remains in the exclusive domain of the panel of academic experts”. “Such a decision cannot be assailed before us in judicial review, only on the ground that some questions were out of syllabus. For the reasons stated above, we do not see any merit in the petition,” the bench noted.