In Brief
The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Uttar Pradesh Police Recruitment and Promotion Board to apply normalized scores at the eligibility stage of a police recruitment examination held across 29 batches with different question papers. The Court held that the expression "marks" in the recruitment rules must have the same meaning at both the eligibility stage and the final merit stage, construed as normalized scores. Since candidates took exams on different dates with varying difficulty levels, normalization was necessary to ensure equal treatment. The Board's advance notification of this procedure and absence of mala fides supported the decision. The High Court's order quashing the selection list and requiring selection based only on raw marks was set aside.
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