The high court on Thursday directed the state school service commission to award an extra mark each to nine candidates in a recruitment test for the post of history teacher after it turned out that their answer to a question on the historic Gandhi-Irwin Pact had been wrongfully treated as incorrect.

The nine candidates had petitioned the court on learning that they had been denied a mark each despite correctly mentioning March 5, 1931, as the date of the agreement between Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Edward Irwin to end the Civil Disobedience Movement.

The evaluation error apparently came to light after the commission published a set of “model answers” where the date of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was mentioned as March 5, 1932. The test had been held in October 2016 to recruit history teachers for classes IX and X in state-aided schools.

Justice Shekhar B. Saraf said the petitioners must be recruited if their individual scores exceed that of the last name on the list of selected candidates after being awarded an extra mark. “The commission will have to appoint the petitioners as history teachers in any government-aided school if their total marks go higher than that of the last appointee.”

Question number 40 in the history paper carried one mark for correctly answering the date and year of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, a landmark in India’s freedom struggle and the cause of outrage for many in England.

In an infamous rant after Gandhi and Irwin had met, Winston Churchill said: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.”

More than 87 years later, the pact appears to be creating a stir of a different kind.

While the school service commission has selected its candidates based on performance in the recruitment test, appointment letters have not been sent out yet.

The results of the test had been declared last year.

The standard practice is to publish a set of model answers a week after the recruitment test so that the candidates can evaluate how they have fared and file objections, if any, within the specified period, a senior official of the commission said.

In the event of disputes, the commission refers those to experts in the respective subjects. Members of the expert committee are teachers of colleges and universities.

“Their opinion is final and it helps the commission take an informed decision on whether marks should be awarded to an aggrieved candidate or not. The commission followed the same procedure in this case as well,” the official said.

The nine petitioners had first approached the commission but the appeal was turned down. They moved the high court early this year.

On checking their answer scripts during the hearing on Thursday, Justice Saraf found that all nine of them had picked the correct answer to the question on when the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was signed.

A group of applicants for the post of Bengali teacher in classes IX and X had previously approached the high court for redress, citing inaccuracies in 11 questions.