Granting an interim stay on the publication of results of the Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) examination for Tamil subject for direct recruitment of PG Assistants (2012-13), the HC has directed the TRB Chairman to appear before it on Sept 16. It also castigated the authorities for setting erroneous questions in the examination for filling up 605 vacancies which was conducted on July 21.
A candidate S Vijayalakshmi (35) from Madurai moved the court stating that there were a lot of printing and typographical errors in Question Booklet B, which she was given and informed the hall supervisor about it. Later when she compared the questions in Booklets A, C and D, she found that there were no mistakes in them.
On July 29, the TRB published the keys. When she represented to the TRB that candidates must be awarded grace marks for questions which contained errors, the Board did not respond to it.
Petitioner’s counsel J Jeyakumar contended that the mistakes are not mere typographical errors but vital enough to the extent of changing the entire meaning of the question and the meaning of the provided answers. He submitted a copy of the Question Booklet B to the court.
Justice S Nagamuthu, who admitted the petition, was surprised that there were 47 mistakes in the 150-objective type question paper. Reading aloud the erroneous questions, he asked, “Do you remember, Tamil has been granted classical language status? The Education department should feel ashamed to set such a question paper with mistakes and errors in Tamil Language, that too for recruiting Tamil teachers”. The judge by an interim order stayed the publication of the results of the Tamil paper and directed the TRB Chairman to appear in person on Sept 16.