CHENNAI: The Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) on Friday rejected allegations of irregularities in the assistant professor recruitment process, stating that discrepancies highlighted on social media were only clerical errors by candidates and had no impact on fairness, evaluation or final selection.
However, the Tamil Nadu All Government Colleges UGC Qualified Honorary Lecturers’ Association remained unconvinced and reiterated its demand for cancellation of the recruitment and a fresh examination.
In a detailed clarification, the TRB said that online applications are processed based on information entered by candidates. Minor mistakes are allowed to be corrected after verification to ensure genuine candidates are not denied an opportunity to appear for the examination. It cited two cases that has sparked public debate.
In one, a candidate mistakenly entered June 5, 2006, as the date of birth instead of September 27, 1991, after copying the ‘TMR Code No. & Date’ from the SSLC certificate. In another case, a candidate entered her SSLC certificate number in place of her name. The TRB said she later submitted a representation with identity documents, following which the correction was permitted after due verification.
According to the TRB, these were purely clerical errors that did not affect eligibility, evaluation, marks, ranking or merit.
Reacting to the clarification, the association questioned why the TRB had not disclosed these details when its representatives met officials on June 29. It claimed they were then informed that no representation had been received in one of the disputed cases.
The association further said that the TRB’s clarification failed to address its primary concern over the evaluation of the descriptive paper. “Our primary concern was how candidates who secured over 100 out of 150 in the objective paper were awarded zero out of 50 in the descriptive paper. That question still remains unanswered,” said association president V Thangaraj.
The association also asked why, if a representation had indeed been submitted on December 25, 2025, the candidate’s particulars remained uncorrected for nearly six months.