TRB assistant professor aspirants seek independent panel to re-evaluate answer scripts

A section of candidates who wrote the Tamil Nadu Teachers' Recruitment Board (TRB) assistant professor recruitment examination in December last year has called for the re-evaluation of their answer scripts by an independent panel of subject experts.

Speaking at a media conference on Monday, the aspirants, who chose not to be identified, said the Higher Education Department should constitute a panel of subject matter experts with experience in assessment and pedagogy. They also sought the inclusion of a statistician on the panel.

The candidates said the merit list published by the TRB raised several questions. They pointed to an unusual pattern in the scores across the two papers. Many aspirants who performed strongly in Paper I, the multiple-choice subject paper, fared poorly in Paper II, the general essay paper. Some who crossed 100 marks out of 150 in Paper I ended up with single-digit scores, or even zero, in Paper II, where the maximum is 50. Conversely, several candidates who scored below 50% in Paper I notched high marks in Paper II.

"We noticed a pattern and approached the TRB seeking answers, but they stonewalled all our questions and even our RTI queries," one aspirant said.

A section of the candidates has moved the Madras High Court over the alleged discrepancies. Following court orders, they were recently given access to the answer keys for Paper II. The aspirants said these keys revealed further deviations. They cited an example where a question on the objectives and impact of various Tamil Nadu schemes carried separate marks for introduction, implementation and conclusion, in addition to two marks each for objectives and impact.

The candidates also noted that the TRB did not scale the Paper II scores, a practice followed in many other competitive examinations, despite the papers having undergone multiple rounds of evaluation.