Hyderabad: The Hyderabad High Court has granted respite to candidates who have appeared for the combined graduate level examination-2014 conducted by the Staff Selection Commission (SSC) on April 12, 2015, by directing the SSC to undertake evaluation of the answer sheets of all candidates who might have made an error in not thickening/blackening the appropriate circles and accordingly declare their results at the earliest.
A division bench comprising Justice Nooty Ramamohana Rao and Justice Anis, while dismissing a petition by the Union of India and the SSC against CAT orders, ruled that failure on the part of a few candidates to thicken a couple of circles in the answersheet was no crime and cannot be a reason for rejecting evaluation of their answer sheets.
The Tribunal had in July 2015 allowed a plea by G. Raja Surya Praveen seeking a declaration of non-evaluation of answer script by the SSC as bad in law. The SSC had reasoned that the candidate had failed to shade / blacken the test form number in the answer sheet.
After noticing that the applicant secured 138 marks in Tier-I written examination and 155 marks in Paper-I of Tier-II, thus totaling to 293 marks out of 400, the Tribunal found fault with the SSC and observed that as the applicant appears to be a meritorious candidate and the failure to shade / blacken the test form number in the answer sheet was a technical error which has no direct bearing upon the issue of undertaking the evaluation of his Paper-II.
