Daily Times

Sir: Sindh Public service commission has conducted screening tests for the combined competitive exam (2018) in different phases. Initially, the commission conducted the test of Sukkur and Larkana districts, followed by Karachi and Hyderabad respectively. Unfortunately, the commission could not manage do the same for all of the tests in conducted.

For example, one test appeared easy; second one moderate and third one difficult. It would have just been better if the commission would have conducted screening tests for the entire Sindh province in a single day, and that each paper presented was the same for all the hopefuls.

Moreover, some mistakes have also been pointed out by many of the aspirants, particularly in the questions and answer keys uploaded by the commission. However, despite all the protests and issues pointed out, the commission has yet to take any concrete steps to fix these errors in any way.

Furthermore, after the paper commission took back both the answer and question papers from the candidates, the question paper could then be easily found circulating on social media immediately after the exams had finished. This raises a big question mark on the transparency and merit of the commission conducting these tests.

Additionally, while back in 2013, the paper contained 100 questions, this time it featured only 50 questions. While many would think that this is an improvement for the candidates appearing in these exams, this time the commission decided to introduce negative marking as well, something that had not been present last time around. Most importantly, both times the passing percentage remained at 50 percent, severely increasing the difficulty level of these tests.

This situation resulted in the participants not only getting a fewer number of choices in questions, the added menace of negative marking made it ever more complicated to obtain a passing grade in the end. It is requested to the chairman of the SPSC to kindly reduce the passing marks from 50 percent to 40 percent, and award grace marks to the candidates, to cover for the mistakes made in the answer keys, so that talented aspirants can get a chance to appear in the written part of the exam as well.

AMJAD BALOCH

Hyderabad

Published in Daily Times, July 12^th 2018.