By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: The Meghalaya Public Service Commission (MPSC) is in the news once again for the wrong reasons.
The Commission has landed into a fresh controversy after glaring errors were detected in the question paper for the written examination against recruitment of three posts of Research Assistant in the Department of Programme Implementation and Evaluation which was conducted on Saturday.
It was reported that there were omission in the serial number and double entry of a question number in question booklet ‘Series III’.
The multiple choice question booklet containing 10 pages, which candidates had to answer in an OMR (optical mark recognition) answer sheet, was detected without question number 108 while question number 148 had been entered twice (both different questions).
The problem was detected in only ‘Series III’ of the question booklet.
However, when the candidates brought these errors to the notice of the invigilators, they were asked to denote their choice of answer with a pencil outside the designated circles.
Since the OMR sheets are scanned by computers for evaluation of marks on the basis of the question booklet, if there is any wrong marking of answers, the same will not tally correctly.
It may be noted that this is the second time problems have been detected in the question papers relating to the same examination.
On July 28 last, there was a shortage supply of question papers to the candidates appearing for the same examination. The MPSC was then forced to cancel the examination when only 215 booklets were available against 423 candidates who were present for the examination.
Following the shortage of question papers, the Commission had called off the examination and rescheduled it to Saturday.