India8217;s great e-paper chase

Strangely, in a country making remarkable strides in information technology, the idea of e-exams refuses to catch on with educationists and bureaucrats. And they stonewall suggestions because, as administrators, they would rather tread the beaten path and be impervious to new ideas.

Yet, the system8217;s advantages need not be underlined, especially when the country8217;s examination system has been ripped apart by the question-paper mafiosi. The exam mechanism throughout the country has been leaking for years now. New exam hijackers like Ranjit Don 8212; whose Bihar-based network completely compromised the IIM and medical entrance examinations and was exposed only in late 2003 8212; are turning out to be popular figures in their home states.

8216;8216;We cannot keep a close watch on everybody in a fully manual system,8217;8217; says higher education secretary S C Tripathi. Faced with this challenge soon after assuming office earlier this month, Tripathi is a strong advocate of e-exams. 8216;8216;It is the best longterm solution.8217;8217;

He is quick to point out he is not advocating complete online exams, which involve huge infrastructure investments like getting separate terminals for all examinees. He would rather delay the despatch of question papers till the last hour and use electronic conveyance for the purpose.

The paper setters would not have to key in the questions long in advance. Once they had discussed it verbally among themselves, they could e-mail it to centres across the country 45 minutes or an hour before the exam.

Examinees would be asked to come and wait inside the exam centres before the question paper got photocopied or printed. There would be hardly any time for human tampering.

A DAY after the leak, Tripathi told reporters, 8216;8216;Once we are using the electronic conveyance method we are eliminating all forms of manual handling of question papers. Even e-mail hackers would not gain when the question papers are sent late. By that time, the examinees would be inside the centres.8217;8217;

Tripathi may be sold on the idea, but there are other bureaucrats in his own ministry who dismiss it. They raise questions: what if there is a power failure, what if hard disks crash, what if telephone lines don8217;t work?

Tripathi says, 8216;8216;Let us just try it out once. There may be problems, which we are not really being able to foresee. Let us first carry out a few trial runs of electronic conveyance of question papers.8217;8217;

HRD Minister M M Joshi accepts the idea in principle. Joshi was not as perturbed over the CBSE examination paper leak as he was five months ago, when the CAT exam paper appeared to have reached the hands of the exam mafia ahead of the tests.

Joshi came to know about the CBSE leak late on April 10 but left for Rajkot to campaign for the BJP the next day. He brushed aside suggestions that he institute a probe into the CBSE leak as he had done after the CAT bungling.

INTERESTINGLY, this is not the first time that e-exams are being proposed. A former director of IIT Chennai P V Indiresan had been insisting the ministry accept and promote e-exams throughout the country. A meeting of ministry bureaucrats following the CAT leak had also voted in favour of e-exams.

Despite that, the All Indian of Council of Technical Education 8212; in charge of all engineering entrance tests except for those of the IITs 8212; stuck to an 8216;8216;improved manual system8217;8217;.

8216;8216;It8217;s foolproof,8217;8217; say some HRD officials, happy to let the old system continue. But the fact that the exam mafia has sensed big money and will target every soft spot in the system see graphic has not really been fully comprehended.

The CAT leak on November 23, 2003, was an eye-opener. It exposed the extent to which the mafia would travel to entice families intent on helping their children get the best education in the country. It also awakened India to the possibility of the system producing several undeserving and unscrupulous doctors, engineers and managers.

NOW even the CBI suspects the CBSE pre-medical examination has been equally porous for the past four years. As such, there could be 200-300 medicos studying in government colleges without being eligible to be enrolled in the first place. These are tomorrow8217;s doctors, people you will consult to cure your son8217;s viral fever, your mother8217;s arthritis.

This sort of crime 8212; of leaking question papers 8212; has been reported for at least a decade. Society may well be saddled with hundreds of doctors, engineers and managers whose school results are nothing to write home about.

No wonder Dr Naresh Trehan of New Delhi8217;s Escorts Heart Centre reacts angrily. 8216;8216;Incidents like this are going to tell upon the entire medical system. This is a symptom of a deeper disease 8230; You have parents encouraging their children to cheat.8217;8217;

Trehan8217;s suggestion is severe punishment for the exam mafia. It should act as a deterrent, he feels. But could a half-baked doctor slip into the system? Trehan tries to be reassuring, 8216;8216;Ours is a super-speciality hospital. So when we recruit, we check the certificates and go by the references. In our system you can8217;t be fooled because either the person knows his job or does not.8217;8217;

Dr Rajat Kumar, professor of haematology, AIIMS, concurs. 8216;8216;It is very demoralising for students who want to get in the honest way 8230; There is need to study the system and plug the loopholes. All it requires is one weak link to have the paper leaked.8217;8217;

FOR the CBSE pre-med candidates these are distressing times. They had prepared for the exams only to be told that it would now be held at a later date. After all, many applicants had to travel quite a distance to reach the centre, in one of 31 cities.

Says Rajat Mahajan, one of the dejected aspirants, 8216;8216;To be told that the paper has been leaked for years in a row is very upsetting. This is my second attempt and I have been studying for the past three years only to gain admission to a medical course.8217;8217;

He warns, 8216;8216;If this goes on for a few more years, the Indian education brands like IIT, IIM or AIIMS would soon lose international credibility.8217;8217; A knowledge economy could be done in by leaking question papers.

Students and their parents are not the only ones worried, psychologists are too. 8216;8216;People lose faith in the system. It8217;s especially frustrating for the academically poor, since their effort goes in vain each time,8217;8217; says Dr Tashneem Raja, psychologist with the Kripa Foundation, Mumbai.

It is obvious that the HRD Ministry has only focussed on the CAT and CBSE pre-med leak. It has not even thought of convening a meeting of state education secretaries to discuss the countrywide ramifications of this common problem. After all, papers are leaked everywhere, almost every month see box.

Consider Gujarat, where it has become so commonplace, official leaks don8217;t even occur anymore.

How? That8217;s because agents have worked out how to evade the noose. They provide aspirants with a set of three question papers, guaranteeing that 80 per cent of the questions will be common. The agents are safe, and as for the students 8212; well, they have to cram answers to a few more questions, but they aren8217;t complaining.

No one8217;s quite sure where the weak link is. Some blame the university press, others accuse the examiners themselves. As in neighbouring Maharashtra, many say that private tuition teachers 8212; some of whom are professors in colleges or 8212; are involved.

Despite the fact that five question papers were leaked during 1998-99 and two in 2001-02 in Gujarat, no action has been taken as yet. The leaks seem to have become a part of life, especially for undergraduate students of commerce and humanities, who claim to have received photocopies of the actual question paper two days before exams.

8216;8216;Every night a friend of mine used to visit the university campus and buy the paper sets for the next day for anywhere between Rs 1,000-5,000,8217;8217; says a student of H L College of Commerce, Ahmedabad. 8216;8216;The papers that we received for business organisation and management BOM and statistics were ditto. Our sources were so confident of their material that they were paid only the next day.8217;8217;

Trust India; it8217;ll never fail the cheating exam.

With Amba Batra in New Delhi, Palak Nandi in Ahmedabad and
Sweta Ramanujan in Mumbai

How they SAT out the problem

AMBA BATRA

ONE set of tests conducted in this country is conspicuously free of the tensions, apprehensions, fears and foibles associated with the exam system in India. The GRE, GMAT and TOEFL exams conducted by the US-based Educational Testing Service has had a largely incident-free tenure in the country for over 50 years.

Vijaya Khandavilli, education adviser at the United States Education Foundation in India USEFI, recalls only one aberration in the 1990s, when students took advantage of the time difference between India and Australia to fax their answer-sheets across. 8216;8216;Even that one particular incident did not affect the system much because the test design is such that candidates don8217;t really benefit from having the paper beforehand,8217;8217; she says.

With all else pre-decided 8212; tests such as SAT, GRE, GMAT and TOEFL are administered globally on set dates, times and places six times a year 8212; it is the design that holds the key to its secrecy, Khandavilli believes. 8216;8216;The design, development and delivery of the test must be foolproof,8217;8217; she says.

With paper-based exams, the questions 8212; set months in advance 8212; are jumbled during the actual administration, so that neighbouring examinees in the same room may receive different sets or orders of questions. The e-exams are computer-adaptive, which means there is a large question bank and questions appear according to the difficulty level of the individual examinee.

The SAT, which is still paper-based but may go online in 2005, is brought into the country through a detective agency and continues to be in their custody till the morning of the exam. The GRE, GMAT and other tests are electronically transported, with select centres across the world provided the codes to access the paper. The test gets delivered to the individual test taker8217;s terminal only after the testing centre administrator checks in the registered candidate8217;s data and the test taker OKs the information.

While specific centres worldwide and some in India offer e-exams for GRE and GMAT, the obstacles are many: E-exams require networking secure computer centres in 30-odd cities, guaranteeing electricity supply/power back-up, ensuring paper-bred examinees know how to answer questions on the computer et al.

Ironically, while e-exams are considered the last word in security at the moment, in the US it is the breach of security over the net that is worrying officials. Last year, for instance, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy in the US suspended the licensing exam for seven months after 15 foreign students 8212; all of Taiwanese origin 8212; were caught 8216;8216;trading8217;8217; 200 exam questions on two Internet chatrooms.

The FBI is currently investigating the case. Apart from being barred from the exam, the 15 guilty may be denied permanent residency in the US, if the Association8217;s plea to the immigration authorities stands up.

Apart from punitive measures, the Association has vamped up security for the exam by expanding the data bank of questions from 1,000 to 10,000, deputing additional vigilance on chatrooms, and ensuring only staff members handled and travelled with the question papers to the test sites.

Though breach in exam security is not widespread in the US 8212; and middlemen selling exam papers for profit unheard of 8212; it is a growing phenomenon. In fact, right now, police recruits in Charlotte, North Carolina, are being investigated for cheating on exams at the police training academy.

Surveys indicate that cheating in high school and college exams is also rampant. A recent survey of over 16,000 college students at 23 campuses across the country had 22 per cent of students admitting to 8216;8216;serious cheating8217;8217; once or more during the 2002-03 academic year, denoting cut-and-paste plagiarism, falsifying or outright making up a bibliography, and copying or using forbidden notes on a test.

High school kids are even more adept at the race to get easy grades. Of 4,500 students surveyed at 25 high schools, for the 2000-01 school year, 74 per cent admitted serious cheating.

To counter tech-savvy students who try to gain an unfair advantage by hacking into exam databases and transmitting exam questions via cell phones and cell phone cameras, recent measures in the US include encryption of exam papers and installation of anti-cheating software on computer-based testing, and a ban on all devices. Students could even be fingerprinted to safeguard standards, says Carmen Catizone, Pharmacy Board executive director.

Simultaneously, international testing agencies are looking into the safety measures for e-exams, even as transporting the paper electronically becomes more and more common.

8216;8216;While security issues do need to be addressed in view of the many leaks in the recent past, we cannot go on adding more locks to the system,8217;8217; says Khandavilli.

8216;8216;The system needs to be secure in design. One can introduce multiple sets and also have a stand-by test so that all students are not affected even if a leak does take place. Maybe the Indian authorities could consult international testing agencies in order to make the system more secure.8217;8217;

LEAK? MORE LIKE A HAEMORRHAGE

DELHI: The capital has been the scene of some sensational paper-leaks as the home of several all-India exams. A rundown of the recent cases:

APRIL 2004
THE PAPER: CBSE8217;s All-India Pre-Medical exam, decider for 1,700 seats in state and Centre-run medical colleges across the country
THE EVENTS: A day before the exam, the Delhi police received a tip that the medical paper had been sold for Rs 6-7 lakh. Two persons were picked up from an East Delhi house, where students were studying up the set paper. The Board was informed, the papers were matched and the exam was cancelled at 10 pm.
THE AFFECTED: 2.4 lakh students
THE INVESTIGATION: The arrests are still underway. But the shock is still settling in: The accused have confessed to leaking the paper successfully for over five years.

NOVEMBER 2003
THE PAPER: The Common Admission Test for management institutes
THE EVENTS: The night before the exam, the CBI raided a hotel near the Delhi airport and discovered students who had been detained for the night. But it was morning before the leak was confirmed. The exam was cancelled even as examinees were answering the paper across the country.
THE AFFECTED: 1.3 lakh students
THE INVESTIGATION: The paper was up for sale for Rs 2.5 lakh. Sixteen people were arrested, and the notorious Ranjit Don was identified as the kingpin behind the racket.

JANUARY 2002
THE PAPER: The All India Post Graduate Medical Education Examination AIPGMEE conducted by AIIMS for 360 seats
THE EVENTS: Some toppers were alleged to have been involved in the leak, which is said to have taken place from the printing press units in Naraina and Okhla.
THE INVESTIGATION: The paper was sold for Rs 2.5 million. Four arrests were made in January 2004.

MUMBAI: Mumbai has been leak-prone for the last couple of academic years. A brief reminder of all the question paper leaks that occurred in Mumbai in recent times:

MARCH 2004
THE PAPER: Financial Accounting and Auditing for TYBCom students
THE EVENTS: The paper was scheduled for 11 am on March 17. Around 9 am, the principal of Mithibai College, Vile Parle, received the question paper by fax. He handed over the paper to University of Mumbai officials, who verified the contents of the paper, confirmed the leak and postponed the exam to March 31. On that day, a journalist at a local afternoon daily received a copy of the fresh paper, and faxed a copy to the V-C. The paper was pushed back to April 8.
THE AFFECTED: More than 64,000 students
THE INVESTIGATION: A complaint was registered, first at Juhu police station and then at the N M Joshi Marg police station. Following the state governor8217;s instructions, V-C Bhalchandra Mungekar asked city police commissioner A N Roy for a detailed probe. One Prakash Suresh Nagariya, a college professor, and his nephew Achal Gupta, an SYBCom student at Mithibai, are in police custody. Statements of top university officials have been recorded.

MARCH 2004
THE PAPER: Class X English third language of the Maharashtra State Board for Secondary and Higher Secondary Education
THE EVENTS: Two days before the exam on March 4, a bundle of 50 question papers were declared missing from St Francis School, Jawahar Nagar, Aurangabad. The exam was cancelled and rescheduled to March 19.
THE INVESTIGATION: Three students of St Francis school and an outsider were arrested. The boys confessed they wanted to steal English first language papers. Landed with this bundle, they handed over the papers to the fourth accused, who retained one paper and burnt the rest. The accused are on bail. The case is with the Aurangabad crime branch.

APRIL 2003
THE PAPER: Financial Accounting and Auditing for SYBCom, Institute of Distance Learning, University of Mumbai.
THE EVENTS: An hour before the exam on April 30, the paper was faxed to university officials by ABVP activists, who had received the paper from students.
THE STATUS: According to the University of Mumbai, there hasn8217;t been any breakthrough in the case.

OCTOBER 2000
THE PAPER: Gynaecology and obstetrics for final year MBBS students
THE EVENTS: Just hours before the exam on October 18, a student was found with the question paper at Grant Medical College. Investigations revealed that the deputy dean and the conductor of examinations were involved; they had reportedly sold the paper for around Rs 500.
THE STATUS: The deputy dean was arrested, suspended and later transferred to a medical college in Pune. The case is pending in the Mumbai District and Sessions court.

CHANDIGARH: The most recent case to shock the city involved the student8217;s first encounter with the system.

MARCH 2004
THE PAPER: Mathematics for Punjab School Education Board class X students. Also, Political Science for Plus-Two students.
THE EVENTS: The maths paper surfaced in book stalls in Ludhiana on March 22. Even as mediapersons waited for the PSEB chairman to make a statement, news came of the second leak, minutes before the exam was to start. Then other papers were also learnt to be available. All class X and Plus-Two exams scheduled after March 22 were cancelled.
THE AFFECTED: 6 lakh students
THE INVESTIGATION: Apparently, a school principal8217;s brother-in-law accompanied him when he went to collect the maths papers from a colleague8217;s house. They then went to an acquaintance8217;s house, where the principal was plied with alcohol, while others photocopied the papers. Three PSEB employees were suspended; eight others, including the principal, were arrested. A set of plus-two papers was discovered in Batala.

GUJARAT 2002
THE PAPER: Business Organisation and Management BOM and Statistics for TYBCom, Gujarat University
THE EVENTS: Vice-Chancellor Naresh Ved was handed over copies of the question papers a few hours before the examination. The BOM test was rescheduled while the Statistics paper was set again.
THE AFFECTED: More than 50,000
THE INVESTIGATION: The probe was taken up by CID Crime but till date neither has a single arrest been made nor have the accused been identified. Not a single varsity official is aware of what happened to the case. When asked, Vice-Chancellor A U Patel said they were waiting for a report from the CID.

Amba Batra in Delhi, Sweta Ramanujan and Prachi Jatania in Mumbai,
Vikas Kahol in Chandigarh and Palak Nandi in Ahmedabad