Thoughts on the MCS examination result, 2013

Thangkhanlal Ngaihte *

Manipur Public Service Commission (MPSC) Building in Imphal (March 2013) :: Pix - Deepak Oinam

When the final results of the Manipur Civil Services Examination 2013 were declared on the night of April 21, 2014, I was in Shimla. I had proceeded there immediately after finishing my interview for the said examination at Imphal to present a paper at a seminar conducted by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla on a subject relating to the Northeast.

I received numerous phone calls and messages congratulating me for my "success" in the examination. Since the Manipur Public Service Commission listed the names of all those who sat in the interview with their scores, and since I was also there (152 in the merit list), many people simply assume that I had passed!! It provided many comic moments and many laughs.

It was only after I returned to Delhi on the night of April 24 that I found time to study the Score Sheet. And what I found – something that testifies to the unpredictability and inherently arbitrary nature of these examinations – provokes me to write this Essay.

What perplexed me the most was the scores in the Essay paper, which, it turns out, seals my fate. In this paper, you select one topic out of seven given, and write a long essay on it within three hours.

Unlike other papers, there is no time constraint. The format is such that it is supposed to genuinely test the candidate's writing capability, command of the language, organization of thought and mastery of the issue selected. It is exactly the kind of format that I believe suits me.

I got 81 marks out of 300 in this Essay paper. I wrote on the Women's empowerment issue, an issue in which I believe I am quite strong. There are some who got as high as 191 marks. More than 92 percent of the candidates who sat in the main examination scores higher than I did (424 out of 457 who completes the exam). I belong to the bottom 7.8 percent.

It is clear that the "expert(s)" who evaluated my paper believed I cannot write a good essay. The sharp differences in the scores further indicated that this evaluator possessed an almost physical science – like certainty about good and bad essays. He, or she, must be a confident chap who believes he can easily pick the bad from the good and scores them accordingly.

It is also equally clear that what this evaluator believe to be a good essay and what I believe to be a good essay are not only different, but opposite.

Because, I have come to believe that writing essay of this nature is my strong suit, and I believe I wrote that particular Essay paper well too. Since the year 2000, I have written and published more than 100 essays in the English language, mainly in The Sangai Express. Since then and till date, I have published short and long essays in publications as diverse as The Statesman, The Hindu, and in journals like Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) and Strategic Analysis (Routledge).

I assume that these publications, some of which are among the most reputed in India, believe I write good essays because in all the competition, they deem it fit to publish my essays and pay me for it. Their judgment and criteria about good and bad essays must also really be very different from the MPSC expert's firmly held ideas of good and bad essays. But, the point is that in the present case, it's the evaluator's opinion that counts here. After the results, all I can do was wonder what this evaluator was thinking and what his (or her) idea of a good essay is.

My point is never that I am the best and I should get a better score; even though I do believe that I deserve a better score, at least in this Essay paper. I have nothing to indicate that the examination process is unfair. But, the phenomenon I described above seems to support what I have been believing all along: that there is a deep and inherent arbitrariness about the evaluation system in these kind of mass scale examinations.

The ailment may not be confined to the MPSC examinations alone. Interested readers may look up to the article I published in The Hindu newspaper on 24 October, 2013, (Link here) where I pointed out the problems inherent in the UPSC examination system, as seen from a candidate's perspective.

In some ways, however, the arbitrariness that often seep into the results at UPSC is understandable, though not excusable, because of the sheer volume of subjective answers that have to be checked manually; the number is in terms of tens of thousands. In the case of Manipur, only 459 candidates appeared in the mains examination. There is enough time to properly check each paper, even by one person, within the three months between mains examination and declaration of results. Hence, in the case of Manipur, such cases are neither understandable or excusable.

In my interview, I was asked why I'd like to come back to Manipur after living and having a secure job in Delhi all these times. That's a common question many candidates have to answer, even from our own families. The fact simply is that Manipur is home and we have no second thoughts about not coming back if given a fair chance to come and work here. We all want to contribute all we can. That's why we still write these examinations; they are the only way to get to the higher services.

It is important that the Commission and its team of evaluators remember this. We take these examinations seriously. It is their duty – not only legally and officially, but also morally – to give us a fair trial. A fair trial, not only in terms of ensuring a corruption-free process, but also in selecting good and competent evaluators. The candidates deserve no less.