The Delhi High Court on Monday ordered a fresh evaluation of the answer scripts for the last year's preliminary test for appointment of judicial officers in the Capital, after deletion of 12 out of 200 questions from the paper.

Holding out a ray of hopes to those who failed to qualify in the Delhi Judicial Services (Preliminary) Examination, 2011, held by the high court, a bench of Justices Badar Durrez Ahmed and V K Jain ordered fresh evaluation of answer sheets within two weeks after deletion of 12 wrong questions.

"The entire exercise be completed by the respondents (Registrar General, Delhi High Court) within a period of two weeks. Consequently, the Main Examination (Written) would also have to be re-scheduled to give enough time for preparation, we feel that it should not be earlier than the May 26, 2012," the bench said.

The court, however, clarified that 276 candidates, who had already been declared selected for the main examination, would not be disqualified as a consequence of the reevaluation. The bench gave the order, partly allowing a batch of pleas from 16 candidates, seeking the relief.

"It is evident that 12 questions would have to be removed / deleted from the purview of the said DJS Exam, 7 questions would require corrections in Answer Key as indicated above and 7 questions (alongwith 174 others not disputed in the course of arguments) require no change in the Answer Key.

"We must make it clear that the 276 candidates, who have been declared as qualified for the DJS Main Examination (Written), are not before us and, therefore, it would not be fair to disturb their status as qualified candidates," the court said.

Earlier, the minimum qualifying marks for general candidates was 120 (60 per cent of total marks 200) and 110 (55 per cent of 200) for reserved category candidates, it said adding now it would come down to 112.8 and 103.4 respectively. The Delhi High Court had conducted the DJS (Preliminary) Examination in December last year for 50 vacant posts of judicial officers here.

The court, in its 64-page judgement, also dealt with a condition which said only 500 candidates (ten times the declared vacancy of 50) can be selected in the preliminary examination for the main written test.

"We now come to the second condition which stipulates that the number of candidates to be admitted to the main examination (written) should not be more than ten times the total number of vacancies of each category advertised.

"We are, therefore, faced with a problem. If we strictly follow this condition then there is no scope for any other candidate (other than the 235 who have been declared qualified) to qualify. But, that would be unfair to them as the question paper itself, as we have seen above, was not free from faults," Justice Ahmed, writing the judgement for the bench, said.

In a bid to 'harmonise' the tricky situation, the court said that it would not disturb the candidates who had already been declared qualified as they were not before it. It gave a slew of directions including that all the answer sheets would be reevaluated.

The minimum qualifying marks for general category candidates would be 112.8 instead of 120 (60 per cent of total marks 200), it said, adding the candidates, who were earlier selected, will have to be added in the list of successful candidates if they fail to figure in the list after the reevaluation.

"Although, the final number of qualified candidates may exceed the figure of 230 (for general category), this is the only way, according to us, to harmonise the rules with the competing claims of the candidates in a just and fair manner. A similar exercise would also have to be conducted in respect of each of the reserved categories," it said.