THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE who applied to the civil service were given incorrect scores and rankings by the Public Appointments Service.

Some 12,656 candidates who’d received their results on 1 April were yesterday informed by the service that an “administrative error” had occurred on publicjobs.ie, the platform used for applications and assessments.

This affected the order-of-merit rankings that deem who is offered a job first. The candidates affected had applied for Clerical Officer roles.

The Public Appointments Service has apologised for the mistake and says it is working to correct all scores.

In a statement to The Journal, the Public Appointments Service said: “Once the issue was identified, publicjobs contacted all affected candidates to inform them of the error, explain the steps being taken to correct it, and apologise for the inconvenience caused.”

It said the issue has been resolved and rescoring is underway. Candidates will receive their updated place in the order of merit once this is complete.

In an email from the Public Appointments Service yesterday, candidates were told: “Prior to this competition launching, publicjobs had updated and introduced new scenario questions which formed part of the Application Form. However, when candidates completed the test, two of those six scenario questions had not updated as intended,” an email to candidates said.

“When candidate responses were scored, the scoring key applied was for the scenario questions included in the intended updated form, and not for two of the scenario questions to which candidates actually responded.

“Consequently, scores applied to candidates’ responses were incorrect for two of the scenario questions, resulting in candidates receiving an incorrect result and ‘order of merit’ for their selected location.”

The email also said a review will be carried out “to ensure that an error of this type cannot happen again”.

“We would like to once again sincerely apologise for this error and deeply regret any inconvenience caused,” it added.