THE Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) recently announced results for Central Superior Services (CSS) exam, showing a pass rate of 2.74 per cent; only 476 of the 17,351 candidates making it to the next stage. Numbers like these have become so routine that hardly anyone blinks anymore. What is troubling is not the low pass rate itself. CSS has always been difficult, and perhaps it should be.

What is troubling is the arbitrary pattern of failure. The FPSC has never published a marking rubric for any paper. It has never shown what a passing answer, or a distinction-level one, actually looks like. Candidates are left studying past papers and guessing at a standard they cannot see emerging.

Since candidates have no right to look at their own marked script, there is no way of knowing whether an answer was genuinely below-par or was simply read differently by whoever happened to mark it that year. And with tens of thousands of scripts to get through in a relatively short period of time, most of us who have gone through this process suspect, rightly or wrongly, that a good deal of that marking is not even being done by the examiner whose name is on the report.

None of this requires reinventing the exam. It only requires the FPSC to publish, subject by subject, the criteria its own examiners are actually using. It requires sharing a few anonymised, checked scripts from top scorers each year — not as a favour to candidates, but because it costs the commission nothing and would tell the aspirants more than any coaching centre can. It requires letting candidates see their own marked papers if they ask for one. And it requires an independent audit of the checking process every few years, so “trust us” stops being the only answer on offer. FPSC is, by most accounts, an institution that takes its own integrity seriously. It should not be afraid of showing its work.

Rashid Talani
Karachi

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2026