ITANAGAR, Aug 11: A group of geography candidates who had appeared in the preliminaries of the Arunachal Pradesh Civil Service Combined Competitive Examination (APPSCCE) 2017-18 has written to the Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Commission (APPSC) chairman regarding anomalies in the official answer keys of the geography optional paper ‘Series C’.
The candidates highlighted that none of the candidates who appeared for the APPSCCE (prelims) with Series C of the geography optional paper has qualified in the recently declared results, and requested for reevaluation of the papers “only after proper correction and verification of answer keys fed in the OMR scanning machine.”
“It may be noted that as per the analysis and the data obtained from qualified candidates, out of randomly checked 127 qualified candidates of geography, no one from Series C has cleared it,” they said, and claimed that it “clearly indicates that there is some anomaly/technical error with regard to official answer key of Series C of geography optional paper.”
According to the data available with the candidates, 46 candidates qualified from Series A, 44 from Series B, nil from Series C, and 37 from Series D.
“After rigorous cross verification from various reference books and reliable sources, we have calculated our attempted questions and found that we are able to secure over 200-250 in aggregate (both GS and optional).
But to our utter dismay and surprise we could not make it in the selected list of prelims results,” they said.
The candidates also cited instances of other errors in the questions, including clerical.
“The commission cannot deny the fact that there might be some technical errors while preparing and putting the answer keys for Series C of the said paper,” they said, and appealed for considering the matter seriously, resolving it as soon as possible, and justifying that there was no foul play on the part of the commission.
While the students maintained that they are not seeking fresh examinations, they demanded the OMR of all qualified geography candidates, clearly displaying their roll numbers and series; display of official the answer key (after properly verifying it with the OMR scanning machine); provision of the marks obtained by the last-placed qualified candidate as per order of merit (minimum cutoff mark); and allotment of grace marks for all the wrong questions.
One of the students also said that they would seek legal recourse if the commission fails to address the issue.
