Hours after several aspirants for Assistant Section Officer (ASO) on Thursday staged a demonstration in front of the Odisha Public Service Commission (OPSC) alleging discrepancies, the Commission issued a clarification later in the day.
As per the OPSC statement, “A total of 1104 candidates qualified in the written examination which is approximately 1.5 times of the advertised vacancy. The Commission, while preparing the provisional list of candidates for document verification and skill test, followed the provision stipulated in the advertisement which states that the Commission shall be competent to fix up the qualifying marks in any or all the subjects of the examination.”
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As per OPSC, the minimum qualifying marks has been fixed for different category of candidates for each paper. Similarly, the answerkeys were validated by an Expert Committee with due regards to the objections/ suggestions given by the candidates immediately after the examination on the basis of which the final evaluation was made. The wrong and ambiguous answers are pro-rated as per the policy of the Commission.
“The allegations by certain candidates in the mainstream and social media that candidates who were absent have been selected are baseless and false,” the OPSC statement read. OPSC further stated that it releases the answer keys, cut-off marks and individual candidate’s marks in the website after the publication of the final result which will followed in case of ASO recruitment.
“OPSC follows a fair and transparent policy in the selection of candidates. This is being followed in letter and spirit in all examinations including A.S.O recruitment. Merit is the only criteria for selection and the Commission strongly condemns any attempt to malign its fairness and merit-based selection criteria,” the statement added.
It is pertinent to mention here that the written examination for Assistant Section Officer (ASO) was conducted in three sittings on August 27, 2022. 1,48,888 candidates appeared in the examination as against the 796 advertised vacancies.