Marks of nearly 5,270 candidates of Higher Secondary (HS) 2003 have been changed with the post-publication scrutiny of their results. The scrutiny results were declared by the West Bengal Council for Higher Secondary Education on Monday. Officials confirmed that as many as 38,279 candidates had applied for the scrutiny process this year.

Statistically, the post-publication scrutiny results proved that more than 13 per cent of the total number of HS examinees applying for the scrutiny were not awarded correct marks in the original results, declared by the council in July.

Mistakes in the results of such a large number of examinees have once again put the council authorities under the scanner. The council had promised to minimise errors in marksheets of students when a large number of aggrieved examinees had dragged it to court after last year’s exams, challenging their tallies in several subjects.

The council on Monday also declared a merit list for HS 2003, with 31 examinees placed in the top 20 positions. In a departure from the previous years, the council had not come out with a provisional merit list at the time of declaration of results.

Monday’s merit list, however, confirmed that Arka Majumdar, a student of Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, had topped HS 2003 with 977 out of 1,000.

Kaushik Dasgupta of South Point School, Calcutta, secured second spot by scoring 971 and Sumanta Basu of Chhatra Nandalal Institution of Hooghly was placed third with 970.

Officials in the council, however, said that in accordance with a recent decision of the state government, it would stop publishing a merit list from next year. This comes in the wake of controversies surrounding the publication and subsequent rectification of merit lists and the debate over its utility.