Amid a row over alleged irregularities in the conduct of computer-based recruitment examination for government jobs, Staff Selection Commission (SSC) Chairman S. Gopalakrishnan on Monday (August 25, 2025) said that all “technical and operational issues” were being resolved.
He said the new system implemented by the Commission was aimed at ensuring more transparency and fairness in the recruitment process, and from the upcoming Combined Graduate Level (CGL) examination, such disruptions were expected to be resolved.
The assertion comes amidst ongoing protests in the national capital and some other parts of the country by government job aspirants and coaching institutes who claimed to have encountered various issues, including technical and operational glitches and exam centres being located far from candidates’ residence (500 km in some cases), during the conduct of Selection Posts/Phase XIII Exams, 2025, held from July 24 to August 2.
“The technical and operational issues are being resolved, and from the ensuing CGL exams onwards, such disruptions are not anticipated. The entities concerned, be it the ECA (exam conducting agency) or the content providers, are subject to strict service level agreements and face deterrent penalties for any shortcomings in performance,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said during a press conference at the SSC headquarters here.
The SSC is one of the largest recruitment agencies of the Union government, with a primary mandate to conduct selections for non-gazetted posts in various Union Ministries and departments among others.
‘Test cancelled at two venues’
Referring to the protests, Mr. Gopalakrishnan said about 5.5 lakh candidates took the recent first Selection Posts exams.
He said, on July 24, the test was cancelled at two venues out of 194 and then rescheduled.
“A detailed log analysis has been done, and about 59,000 candidates have been identified for whom, to set the record straight, three special exam shifts for Selection Posts exams have been scheduled on August 29,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said.
He, however, said the computer-based tests for the stenographer posts from August 6 to 8 were conducted without any hitch, and reiterated that disruptions were expected to be addressed from the CGL exam, which has been postponed to mid-September.
On some aspirants being allocated distant exam centres, the Chairman said that the previous exam conducting agency, TCS, had many centres where they could accommodate more seats per shift.
“The new ECA has started to ramp up centres in many places. As a result of this, for the first test, candidates in some cities were scheduled at places far away. This has been redressed from the steno (stenographer) exam onwards, when 80% candidates have been given centres at cities of their choice,” he said.
‘Coaching institutes protesting to save business’
While facing further questions on the protest, the SSC chief criticised coaching institutes and said they had nothing to do with the interests of genuine candidates or the functioning of the Commission.
He said they had joined the protest to save their business, which had been severely affected due to various reforms initiated by the Commission, including “E-dossiers”— a system for secure, tamper-proof and transparent handling of candidate dossiers of recruitment examinations.
Further, deviation from the old pattern of questions had rendered their (coaching centres) material of not much use, he said.
Mr. Gopalakrishnan said the style of conducting recruitment examinations had been modified since July 2025.
“Consequent to a Supreme Court Order, the responsibility for questions has been unbundled and given to other selected agencies. Till June 2025, for all SSC exams, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) used to set the questions. From July 2025, the questions come from content agencies and not from the ECA,” he said.
‘Bugs in digital question delivery system addressed’
On glitches in the computer-based tests, he said a significant change was that questions were being delivered from a vault digitally, and in this process, there had been some bugs which resulted in duplication of questions, multiple repeats of the same options, etc., which had been addressed.
“Though these are to be avoided, there will be no impact on candidates since the effect is uniform, marks addressed by question challenge mechanism and adoption of equi-percentile method of normalisation in order to balance differences in exam difficulty across various shifts,” the SSC chief said.
He said the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) had been roped in for IT security since CBTs were prone to technological hacking attempts and in most cases, “in connivance with private test centres which are engaged by the ECA to conduct the exams”.
“This called for technical integration between the CDAC and Eduquity (exam conducting agency), which came about after initial hiccups for a few days,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said.
He said there were two other entities engaged — one for exam monitoring and another for developing content tools and providing IT application support.
“Unlike the earlier pattern where all activities were undertaken by a single entity, tests are now conducted with active engagement of multiple agencies,” the SSC chief said.
Published – August 26, 2025 12:48 am IST
