The school service commission (SSC) has uploaded a list of “tainted” candidates whose admit cards were withheld to prevent them from appearing in the selection tests for non-teaching posts in government-aided schools.

The commission on Saturday uploaded a “rejection list” of 256 candidates. They are barred from the test scheduled on March 1 for Group C (clerk) posts. It also uploaded another “rejection list” of 288 candidates so they could not write the test scheduled on March 8 for Group D posts.

The commission said: “It has come to the notice of the commission that some of the candidates from the 1st SLST (AT-Assistant Teacher) 2016 and 3rd RLST (NT-Non Teaching), 2016, whose names feature in the list of the tainted candidates uploaded on the commission’s website..., have applied for the 1st SLST (Non Teaching Staff), 2025.

“The commission has compared the list of applicants with the aforesaid tainted lists through a preliminary system-based check.”

Based on the check, the candidature of such candidates was being cancelled, it said.

Tainted means the OMR (optical mark recognition) sheets of these candidates were tampered with, suggesting their scores may have been fraudulently inflated or they had been appointed after jumping ranks.

Rank jumping means that, though the candidate was in the lower tiers of the merit list, he or she was appointed, depriving those above.

Another illegality that the CBI pointed out while identifying tainted candidates was appointments despite names not featuring on the merit panel, said an education department official.

SSC chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar said the Supreme Court and Calcutta High Court had said the “tainted candidates must not be allowed to take part in the fresh selection process” for the appointment of teaching and non-teaching staff in government-aided schools.

Some of the tainted candidates wrote the selection tests held last September to shortlist candidates for the appointment of teachers at the secondary and higher secondary levels.

Some of them even appeared in interviews and made it to the merit list published on January 21.

Their names were removed from the merit list before the counselling round began.

The commission published a list of 1,806 tainted candidates from a pool of 17,209 terminated teachers before the selection tests on September 7 (secondary level) and 14 (higher secondary level).

Last November, it published a list of 3,512 tainted candidates from a pool of 8,544 sacked Group C and D staff so they could not apply during the month-long online submission of forms.

An SSC official said while drawing the rejection list, they also scanned a list of 1,853 non-teaching-job aspirants who were waitlisted but not appointed, and have been found guilty of “OMR mismatch” in the CBI investigation.

The commission published the list in mid-January following a court order

On April 3, 2025, the Supreme Court terminated the jobs of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff because the recruitment process held in 2016 had been “vitiated beyond redemption”.