Even as the Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission (APPSC) has announced the schedule of interviews for the posts of various services under Group-1 from June 17, the applicants continue to demand an investigation into the conduct of the examinations citing several anomalies.
Candidates who had appeared for the Group-1 Mains filed a petition in the A.P. High Court against digital evaluation of answer sheets taken up by the APPSC. The court had posted the case for hearing on June 14, and asked the APPSC to file a counter affidavit.
The candidates say that digital evaluation is prone to errors. Each examination paper has different subjects such as geography and history, which require different evaluation. The UPSC has gone for manual evaluation despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The experiences of PSCs of various States show that digital evaluation is prone to data manipulation errors, they say.
“The APPSC has so far not clarified how different subject questions have been taken for evaluation by experts,” says a candidate.
“The APPSC has also not released the data on how many of the 6,800 candidates who appeared for the Mains examination in December 2020 wrote it in Telugu and English,” the candidates say.
As per the data of the previous tests, 10-15% opted for Telugu medium, and the proportion of candidates selected for interviews remained the same.
But this time, an overwhelming 40-45% candidates selected for interviews are from the Telugu medium, according to the commission.
“How is the proportion so high? This implies that the APPSC has not taken up scaling parameterization thoroughly,” say another candidate.
“We demand a judicial inquiry into the whole issue, followed by manual evaluation under judicial supervision,” says yet another candidate.
