Police in Patna resorted to lathi charge on Friday afternoon to disperse civil service aspirants protesting over the issue of “normalisation” in the Bihar Public Service Commission’s preliminary test.
Popular educators and teachers of Patna coaching centres, Faizal Khan, popularly known as Khan Sir and Motiur Rahman Khan, known as Guru Rahman, also joined the protesters. They demanded that Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) chairperson R B Parmar declare in a written notification that there will be no normalisation in the BPSC preliminary test, scheduled to be held on December 13.
Police briefly detained some of the protesters, and the two teachers appealed to the aspirants to remain peaceful in their protest.
Normalisation is a process aimed at addressing possible variations in the difficulty of different question papers handed out at different shifts of the same exam. The commission has considered holding the exam in two shifts, and if candidates score considerably lower marks in one shift than those in the other shift, then normalisation could be done by increasing the scores of those who got the “harder” question paper.
A police official lathicharges aspirants during their protest over normalisation of the 70th BPSC examination. (PTI)
Protesting BPSC aspirants have opposed this, and the BPSC itself has maintained ambiguity on whether or not it would implement normalisation.
BPSC secretary Satya Prakash Sharma said the commission had not announced normalisation, and that examination would take place in a single shift. However, BPSC aspirants have demanded a written notification from the chairman of the commission in this regard.
Khan Sir told reporters, “This is not Mathematics that can fetch uniform marks. The examination is of General Studies, where questions cannot be quantified and it would be absurd to adopt normalisation. This can deny many deserving students from cracking the prelims.”
Guru Rahman said, “We are strongly with the students and will keep protesting until the commission tells us in written that there will be no normalisation.”
The BPSC had first adopted normalisation in the 64th Combined (Preliminary) Competitive Examination held in 2018. After several candidates opposed it and pointed out errors in marks calculations, the Patna High Court had intervened, directing the commission to review the process. The BPSC then re-evaluated the scores and released revised results, which led to changes in the merit rankings of some candidates.
