UPSC, SSC Exams: Government job seekers demand students’ panel, tight monitoring in appeal to commission, DoPT

Over the past four months, a group of 179 candidates for UPSC and SSC jobs have been speaking to thousands of their counterparts to draw up a list of measures that would make large-scale government recruitment tests “student friendly”. Over the weekend, five of them met chairpersons of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and the Department of Personnel and Training’s standing committee to hand their recommendations over.

The recommendations demand fairness and transparency in the conduct of the exams. The UPSC conducts the highly-competitive civil services examinations (CSE) for top administrative jobs in government and the Staff Selection Commission (SSC) for lower ranking positions. Each set of exams is written by lakhs of ‘sarkari naukri’ – government job – seekers. The candidates demand an independent ‘Student Commission of India’, transparency and fairness in the examination process and tight monitoring that prevents the use of faulty or invalid certificates in the selection process that follows such exams.

Abhishek Singh, who led the five-member delegation, said: “Both UPSC chairman and standing committee head of DoPT have accepted our recommendations and have ensured us that they will look into these issues.”

Both the survey and recommendations come in the wake of massive disruption to the SSC exams in July and August this year. Exams were cancelled or postponed and at many places where they did take, were marred by technical glitches. Thousands protested in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan and Jantar Mantar. Academia360 reported on the impact of the SSC exam debacle on students.

SSC exam vendor, ‘optional subject’ in UPSC CSE

The candidates demand investigation of examination irregularities, robust monitoring of examination centres, timely redress of genuine grievances, question paper quality control and moderation. They demand a mechanism for scrutiny of suspect certificates submitted after selection.

Those aiming to write the SSC exams – such as, SSC CGL, SSC CGSL and others – demand that the Commission appoint a new vendor to conduct the examination. They blame the vendor for the poor exam experience in the summer.

UPSC aspirants have been demanding removal of the “optional subject” which, they allege, is leading to subjectivity in marking. Singh explained, “Many subjects like engineering and science receive full marks whereas students from humanities don't. This skews the results. As suggested in the Baswan Committee of 2016 – which focussed on eligibility, syllabus and pattern of the examination – we demand removal of optional subjects to create uniform marking for every one equally.”