Assistant professor recruitment candidates demand independent panel for re-evaluating papers

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A section of aspirants who appeared for the assistant professor recruitment examination organised by the Tamil Nadu Teachers’ Recruitment Board (TRB) in December last year have demanded re-evaluation of their answer scripts by an independent panel of experts pointing to several discrepancies in the marking system.

At a media conference here on Monday, the aspirants, who did not want to be named, said the Higher Education Department should set up a panel of subject matter experts who have experience in assessment and pedagogy to re-evaluate the answer papers. The panel should also include a statistician, they demanded.

They pointed out that the merit list released by the TRB threw up several questions. They noticed that many of the aspirants who had scored high in Paper I (subject paper, multiple choice type) came a cropper in Paper II (General Essay). Some candidates who scored well over 100 marks out of a total of 150 in Paper I ended up scoring very poorly — some of them scored in single digits or even zero — in Paper II, in which the maximum mark is 50. Similarly, many candidates who scored less than 50% in Paper I scored highly in Paper II. “We noticed a pattern and approached the TRB seeking answers, but they stonewalled all our questions and even our RTI queries,” said one of the aspirants.

Moreover, a section of the aspirants, who filed cases in the Madras High Court against the discrepancies and were provided with the answer keys for Paper II recently as per court orders, said the answer keys threw up several deviations as well. “If the question asked about objectives and impact of different schemes in Tamil Nadu, the answer key provided separate marks for an introduction, implementation, and conclusion heads as well, apart from two marks each for objectives and impact,” pointed out an aspirant.

Besides, the TRB did not scale the scores of the candidates in Paper II, as is the practice in many other competitive examinations, although the papers went through multiple evaluations, they added.

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