[ Nellie Manpoong ]
ITANAGAR, Aug 18: Following complaints of the geography candidates regarding anomalies in the Series-C question paper of the Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Combined Competitive Examination (APPSCCE-prelims), the Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Commission (APPSC) re-evaluated the papers and found that 76 additional candidates from Series-C paper have qualified to appear for the mains.
A notice regarding this was issued by the APPSC on 16 August.
This has taken the total number of candidates qualifying for the mains examination from 1263 to 1339.
Clarifying on the issue, APPSC Secretary Taru Talo said it was “human error.”
Regarding apprehension that there could be similar errors in other subjects, Talo said the commission has checked all other subjects and found no such errors in them.
“Apart from the geography paper, we also checked other subjects and have not found any such error,” he said.
When asked whether the technician feeding the answer key into the OMR machine received wrong answers, he clarified that the answers provided were correct but the technician made some slipup.
On how the commission would live up to the expectations of the candidates after such a large-scale error, the secretary reiterated that it was human error and not intentional.
“To err is human,” he said. “We have accepted the error and corrected them as we do not want to deprive deserving candidates.”
Earlier, on 11 August, geography candidates from Series-C had written to the APPSC, demanding the OMR of all the qualified geography candidates and displaying of the official answer key after proper verification in the OMR scanning machine, among other demands.
