Many questions in Rajasthan Public Service Commission paper have been framed wrongly.
Recently, the Rajasthan Public Service Commission (RPSC) conducted an examination to appoint Public Relations Officers (PROs) for its office, but the erroneous answer key for the examination paper will leave you amused and shocked.
Consider some of the wrong answers mentioned in the key. The key suggests that a “news item” that appears a few days before the occurrence of the event is a “news brief”; the Press Trust of India (PTI) has nothing to do with India as RPSC thinks it is a foreign agency.
The meaning of the popular Hindi phrase, Aag Babula Hona, means losing your cool, but the RPSC’s key suggests that it means Babul Ke Ped Par Chadhna (climbing on Acacia tree) and the meaning of a Hindi word tushtikaran is not “appeasement” but “modification”, according to the RPSC’s answer key.
The aforementioned mistakes in the answer key are just a few, but there are many more. The name of a reporter in a news story is termed as the byline, but RPSC answer key calls it the “header”; twitter is not a social media or microblogging site, but a programming service provider; for you, the purpose of community radio may be to enable a community to tell its own stories, but the RPSC thinks it a tool of entertainment and, as per the RPSC, Doordarshan, a public TV channel, and not PIB, is the nodal agency of the government to publicise the government’s policies.
The question and answer key for the RPSC’s PRO examination accessed by The Sunday Guardian suggests that as many as 70 answers in the key are wrong. Many of the questions in the RPSC paper have been framed wrongly and some of the questions have lost meaning due to the pathetic English to Hindi translation.
Nikita Rana, an applicant, told The Sunday Guardian: “I was confident that I will secure this post, but when the results came, it was against my expectations. This forced me to check with the answer key and the answers suggested in the key were shockingly wrong. I have no idea who set the question paper as you can check a copy of it on your own; even the framing of several questions is wrong. For those taking an examination in the English medium, reading the questions must have been fun.”
For clarification, the answer key is meant to help the evaluator to evaluate the paper. The key is also made to determine the marks of the candidates. With an error-filled answer key, the evaluators must have awarded wrong marks to the applicants.
This reporter tried to contact senior RPSC officials to point out these errors in the answer key set for the PRO examination, but RPSC officials were not available to comment on the issue. This reporter also made several calls to Deepak Upreti who is the chairman of the RPSC on his fixed line, but the attendant on the other side said: “Write in the feedback section and don’t make any calls here as no one will speak to you.”
The Sunday Guardian has learnt that the feedback section given on the RPSC website is only available for applicants and not for sending a general query. Also, the website has no mention of any email-ID of either the Chairman or Commission members.
When this reporter tried to contact RPSC members Shiv Singh Rathore, Rajkumari Gurjar and Ramu Ram Raika, a suggestion similar to the one given by the Chairman’s office was received.
In the course of the investigation, The Sunday Guardian has learnt that the RPSC has been functioning in a haphazard manner as out of a total of seven commission members, four posts for the same have been lying vacant for a long time. Also, the allegedly “political appointments” in the Commission as members and Chairman have damaged the credential of the Commission.