THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Having failed to elicit a proper response from the Public Service Commission (PSC) regarding their complaints on the preliminary examination, a group of Kerala Administrative Service aspirants have pinned their hopes on court verdicts expected this week.
The development comes when PSC is set to conduct the first main examination on November 20. The complainants have filed cases before the High Court and the Kerala Administrative Tribunal demanding a re-examination and they expect a hearing in the next couple of days.
The candidates alleged a lack of transparency in the backdrop of PSC evaluating manually the preliminary exam mark sheets (optical mark recognition) of close to 18,000 candidates, from a total of 3.3 lakh candidates, because of a technical glitch. The commission later appointed its staff to evaluate the answer paper and the window for revaluation was cut short to 15 days during the Onam holidays amid coronavirus pandemic.
Some candidates who have applied for re-evaluation and for copies of answer sheets were in for a surprise when they received parcels from PSC by post. "I have received a blank A4 sized sheet as my answer sheet. Though I approached the PSC, Crime Branch and the court, I am yet to receive my answer sheets," said Anandhu CS, from Kottarakara.
Another aspirant based in Thiruvananthapuram said the copy of the answer sheet that she received for Paper II was not hers but someone else's. Altaf Hamed Shajahan, a 32-year-old candidate from Kottayam, alleged that PSC would have erred during the manual tabulation and in the process jeopardised the chances of candidates like him.
PSC chairman MK Sakeer and the spokesperson did not respond to calls by The New Indian Express. Earlier, the chairman had clarified that one or two per cent of OMR sheets are usually rejected by the machine and that no special OMR sheet was used for the KAS examination.