Chennai: The Madras high court has reserved orders on a petition, which sought a direction to the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission to revise the answer keys and the list of selected candidates for admission to the main written examination with respect of posts included in Combined Civil Services-I Examination (Group-I Services) 2016-2019.
Justice V.Parthiban reserved orders on a petition filed by S.Vignesh, an aspiring Group-I Services candidate, after hearing both sides.
When the petition came up for hearing on Thursday, Advocate N.Subramanian appearing for the petitioner submitted that when the petitioner perused the key answers, to his shock and surprise, 10 key answers among the total 200 were wrong. Immediately, the petitioner has challenged those 10 questions with the correct answers for which he was having reference materials available and uploaded the same in the official website. The petitioner reliably learnt that some other candidates have also challenged the answer keys as well as some questions which were also found to be improper with supporting materials. In addition to the questions challenged by him, taking into consideration of the questions challenged by others, there were totally 17 wrong answer keys works and one wrong question, thus, 18 out of 200 questions were to be revalued by the TNPSC reference to the text and other reference materials. However, shockingly, without acting upon the petitioner’s representation, the TNPSC published the list of candidates eligible to be admitted for main examination on April 3, 2019 without publishing the revised answer keys after taking note of the said 18 wrong questions. Further even the cut off marks for the selection of candidates for the main examination has not been published. The petitioner has a right to see his answer sheets as well as others to be furnished by the TNPSC and also the cut off marks, Subramanian added.
Senior counsel R.Thiagarajan, appearing for the TNPSC submitted that after finding the mistakes, the TNPSC has awarded marks to all the candidates. There were 31 posts in General Turn, to which the petitioner belongs. If 50 candidates were taken into account for the 31 posts, there will be 1550 candidates. The mark scored by the 1550th candidate will be the cut off marks. Even after adding additional marks, the petitioner was not even near to the cut off marks, he added and produced the mark obtained by the petitioner in a sealed cover.
Following this, the judge reserved orders.
