The high court has asked the college service commission to award marks for three history questions to a teaching job aspirant after it was found that the commission had provided incorrect options for some of the answers and made mistakes while checking the OMR sheet.

The candidate wrote the State Eligibility Test (SET) on January 9, 2022. He filed a petition contending that he was not awarded marks for four questions answered correctly.

Justice Jay Sengupta sought the opinion of experts from Calcutta University while deciding on the appeal.

In a written order last week, he said that of the four questions, all the experts agreed that the petitioner marked the answer correctly for question No. 54.

The CU experts said the “correct answer was not there” among the four options against question No. 22.

“Therefore, the petitioner ought to get advantage.... As regards question number 70, according to the report from the University of Calcutta, the petitioner attempted the right answer and the commission in the answer key had provided the wrong answer,” says the November 12 order.

Muhammed Sanaullah, the candidate who filed the petition, said he answered questions 54 and 70 correctly, but the commission did not award him marks because the final answer keys based on which the commission evaluated the answer scripts were incorrect.

“The commission did not even bother to include the right answer among the four options with question 22. Therefore I got the benefit of the doubt”, he said.

In the written test, the candidates are tested on multiple-choice questions. The candidates must bubble the correct option on the OMR among the four options given with each question.

The petitioner had answered question number 86 incorrectly, the order said.

“In the result, the petitioner should get the marks for answering question numbers 22, 54 and 70,” Justice Jay Sengupta said.

Sanaullah’s lawyer Ekramul Bari said that with the revision, his client will score the qualifying marks.

The candidates vying for the post of assistant lecturer in history wrote a paper of 300 marks. The score in the written test of the last qualified candidate is 152.

“Our candidate’s score was 148. If he gets 2 marks each for the three questions, his score will be 154. This means his score will go past that of the last qualified candidate and he will become eligible for an interview for vacant posts in history in government-aided colleges,” Bari told The Telegraph.

Dipak Kar, the commission’s chairman, said: “We would act following the court order.”

Sanaullah said: “Many candidates who qualified for the written test were called for an interview. I was deprived of the chance because of the commission’s fault.”

When the petitioner complained about the erroneous marking of questions in February 2022, the commission argued that the petitioner had complained about the faulty marking beyond the last date for feedback according to a notice published by the authority on January 25, 2022.

The court rejected the commission’s objection.