The objetives of this work were a) to determine physical and physiological qualities of soybean seeds of the cultivars OCEPAR-4, IAS-5 and Bragg, produced in three regions of Parana State (North, West and South) in 1989/90; b) to determine the cause of discard of seed lots produced in the state. Four seed samples for each cultivar were collected in each region. The evaluations were standard germination, accelerated aging, field emergence and tetrazolium. The results led to the following conclusions: deterioration of the seed due to adverse climatic conditions between physiological maturity and harvesting contributed for decreasing physiological quality; cultivars OCEPAR-4 and IAS-5 showed high physiological quality on regions West and South; the cultivar Bagg showed bad performance with high levels of seed deterioration and mechanical injury.