The school service commission has found that there is a genuine mismatch of marks even for the 180-odd secondary school teachers whose difference between what they actually got and what their results showed was only 1 or 2 marks, said a senior official of the commission. The OMR sheets of the 180 teachers have been rechecked manually.
Such mismatch suggests manipulation at a later stage, an SSC official said.
OMR (optical mark recognition) sheets on which the teaching job aspirants wrote their test in 2016 are scanned by the computer.
The commission last week announced that it would hold manual scanning of 180-odd scripts to find out whether the machine during a high-speed scan made any mistakes by reading unintentional pen marks on OMR sheets.
On Monday, the commission cancelled the “recommendation” for 618 secondary school teachers after it was found that they had secured their jobs allegedly through a bigger manipulation of marks.
The 180-odd candidates had been kept out of the list as the manual scanning was underway.
“The report of the manual scanning has reached the commission. There is a clear mismatch of marks even for the 180-odd secondary school teachers,” said a commission official.
Manipulation of marks is evident from the fact that the candidate’s marks in selection test results available on the commission’s server did not correspond to the responses captured on the OMR sheet details of which were retrieved from the hard disc.
SSC chairman Siddhartha Majumdar declined to comment.
The commission sought details of the OMR sheets in November from the CBI, which is investigating allegations of irregularities in appointments.
“It emerged after scanning the OMR sheets and going through records, that the commission had recommended 808 candidates for appointment despite the manipulation of marks. This figure includes those cases where the mismatch was by 1 or 2 marks, necessitating a manual scanning,” said an official of the commission.
Will the commission now put out a list of the 180 candidates after the completion of manual scanning?
“The list won’t be put out considering that the 800-odd Class-IX and Class-X teachers moved an appeal before a division bench of the Calcutta High Court seeking setting aside of an order passed by Justice Biswajit Basu of the same court, asking the SSC to start the process of terminating the services of these teachers as their appointments were made on the basis of manipulation of marks,” said an SSC official.
“In fact the day we came up with the list of 618 candidates, the division bench heard the case.” said the official.
“They (the teachers) are yet to understand why it is being said that marks were not tallying with the OMR sheet,” the lawyer appearing for the teachers had said during the hearing.
