M A I N   N E W S

No to negative marking
PCS candidates up in arms
Chitleen K. Sethi
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 28
While the shoddy preparation of question papers with scores of printing errors led to considerable commotion among candidates who appeared in the Punjab Civil Services (PCS) Examination, 1998, re-conducted by the Punjab Public Services Commission (PPSC) at Patiala yesterday, today was a day of utter dismay for most of the candidates with news spreading that there was to be no negative marking, unlike the 1998 pattern.

Till yesterday evening, candidates were simply laughing away some of the extremely foolish printing mistakes in the question papers. Today, however the candidates were up in arms against the PPSC stating that they were not told that there would be no negative marking, as a result of which they had left many questions unattempted.

Pointing out that the 1998 prospectus (which was to be followed for these examinations) states on page 6 that there will be negative marking, a last minute change was unacceptable. Negating these claims, the PPSC Chairman, Mr S.S. Sanghra, however pointed out that the set of instructions sent to the candidates with the roll numbers this time did not say that there will be negative marking, so why did the candidates presume it?

He said, ‘‘In 1998, the fact that there will be negative marking had been clearly stated in the prospectus, the set of instructions issued to the students along with their roll numbers and the OMR (Answer) sheet, but this time these lines had been deleted from the set of instructions sent to the students with the roll numbers as well as the OMR sheets. This made it obvious that there would be no negative marking. And in any case, these instructions sent with the roll numbers supercede anything given in the 1998 prospectus.”

For students however, the absence of instructions to that effect was more obvious. “The advertisement announcing the reconduct of the examinations, said that the prospectus would be the same and so everyone presumed that there would be negative marking. And in any case if a decision had been taken that there would be no negative marking this time, instead of just deleting these lines from the instruction and OMR sheets, a line stating that there would be no negative marking could have been added,’’argued a candidate from Patiala who did not want to be named but stated that he had left over 35 questions unattempted.

Conceding the fact that there were innumerable printing errors in the question papers, the chairman said that candidates had been given benefit for every misprinted question. But how were these obvious mistakes allowed to go? ‘‘We had two options. Either we could have got the papers corrected by some other set of people compromising on confidentiality or let the mistakes be. We chose the latter and we have no regrets. The minimum number of people possible were made to handle the question papers to ensure that there is total confidentiality.' he said.

The perplexed candidates, were yesterday grappling with questions some of which did not have the right answer as one of the options or with an option incomplete, or a wrong question. ‘‘In geography, we had a question that according to a UN study, the population of the world will be as high as 7 crore in which year? The question was incorrect, it should have been 700 crore. 7 crore was the population of the world in the middle ages or something,’’ quipped a candidate. For a history candidate, for the question who was the last Mughal emperor of India, the correct answer Bahadur Shah II was not one of the options. Instead there was Bahadur Shah I, the emperor who followed Aurangzeb. No one knew what to do. In another question one of the options was incomplete. ‘‘The paper was galore with spelling mistakes. Instead of farming it was written forming, rice in place of rise, Bazmi in place of Barni. In another question two options out of the four were the same.’’ said another candidate. The candidates also pointed out that while at certain centres the corrections were announced in many centres these were not. Over 6000 candidates had appeared for the PCS entrance test yesterday at various centres in Patiala.