Jodhpur, Aug. 9 -- The Rajasthan high court has upheld the normalisation process adopted in the Patwari Direct Recruitment Examination 2021, rejecting a batch of appeals filed by candidates who alleged unfair evaluation in the fourth shift, held on the day of the Karwa Chauth festival, an advocate familiar with the proceedings said on Wednesday. A division bench of justice Pushpendra Singh Bhati and justice Chandra Prakash Shrimali dismissed the appeals. The bench held that the normalisation formula adopted by the state staff selection board was based on expert recommendation and uniformly applied across all four shifts. The petitioners, who appeared in the fourth shift on October 24, 2021, had alleged discrimination due to a sharp drop in the number of successful candidates from their batch compared to other shifts. As per the data cited in the petitions, 35% of the successful candidates were from the first shift, 31% from the second, 22% from the third, and only 11% from the fourth. The appellants argued that the results showed "extreme prejudice" and that no candidate from the fourth shift figured in the top 100 ranks. Rejecting the argument that normalisation was applied arbitrarily and after the exam had concluded, the court observed: "The normalisation process... is the bone of contention in the present case," but emphasized that it was a standard and statistically valid method for eliminating disparities across shifts with different question papers. "Normalisation/equalisation/scaling are the techniques, which are statistical in nature and used to dismantle the disparity between the participative recruitment candidates," the court said....