New Delhi: In order to bring about greater transparency, the Railway Board has decided that all departmental promotion examinations will be conducted by the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) Computer Based Tests (CBTs) henceforth. Till now, the RRB was only in charge of recruitment examinations and those for promotion were held by the zonal railways, leading to allegations of favouritism.
“This decision has been taken, keeping in mind the long experience of transparent and fair exams held by the RRB. All zonal railways will now prepare a calendar for such departmental promotion examinations. The examinations will be conducted based on this calendar,” a senior Railway Board official said.
According to the Board, more than 7 crore candidates have taken RRB’s CBTs since 2015, without any allegations of paper leak, impersonation, remote log-in, or use of spy devices. This has been possible due to a stringent process followed while selecting an exam conducting agency.
Even after that, every exam centre is inspected by a railway team. Centres have 100% CCTV coverage and recording starts two hours before the examinations and continues till an hour after they end. All mouse and key clicks are recorded with time stamp for audit purposes.
“In case of RRB exams, information about the city is disclosed about 10 days in advance, while candidates get to know the names of the centre only four days before the exams. The conducting team also gets information about the candidates just two hours before the start of the exams. All of this results in greater transparency,” the official said.
In CBTs, candidates are shown their question paper, answer booklets along with correct answer keys. They are also given an opportunity to raise objections regarding the correctness of questions and answer keys, if any.
