Opinion: Twin problems of exam
While conducting a public exam in India is an impossible task owing to its scale, cheating adds to the challenge
By T Muralidharan
Any nation will not collapse due to atomic bombs or the use of long-range missiles. It collapses when you lower the quality of education and allow cheating in the examinations by the students,” said a wise man. The consequences of cheating in an exam are deep. The patient dies in the hands of such doctors. The buildings collapse in the hands of such engineers. The money is lost in the hands of such accountants. Humanity dies in the hands of such religious scholars. And justice is lost in the hands of such judges…
Recently, there has been a lot of public outcry about the sanctity of NEET exam and anyone and everyone is accusing the National Testing Agency of incompetence. I want to show you a different picture because we have conducted large recruitment examinations.
Public Exam
Conducting a public exam in India is an impossible task. A few years ago, a pen-and-paper exam was conducted for the recruitment of 300 employees in Tamil Nadu. Over 2 lakh candidates applied and 1.65 lakh were shortlisted. Physical exams were conducted in 5 cities, 177 exam centres, 4,933 rooms with 5,000 invigilators. The exam was conducted in one session simultaneously, across all the locations. The paper was not leaked and there were zero reports of mass cheating. But when results came out, it was found that a few candidates cheated using high-tech electronics micro equipment imported from China. This equipment was not detectable with the surveillance set up at the exam centre. A coaching centre, in a far away State, charged hefty amounts for organising the cheating but to only a few who paid. The public outcry on discovering that a few candidates from a remote State had passed forced the exam to be scrapped but most of those genuinely selected were penalised and lost the job opportunity.
This illustrates the twin problems of exam viz, scale and, more importantly, the strong propensity of everyone to cheat in India.
Alpha, Beta Error
There are two types of errors in an exam assessment — Alpha and Beta. The Alpha error is about the wrong person getting through the assessment while the Beta error is about the right person failing the assessment. For example, cancelling an exam after an unsubstantiated claim of leak or even limited fraud fixes the cheater but penalises the majority of genuine selected candidates. Even the Supreme Court tries to balance the two types of errors and the recent NEET decision of the Supreme Court to declare the results despite a few cases of fraud is the correct one — not to penalise the large majority of genuine exam takers because of a few fraudsters.
The complexity of conducting any public exam in India is stupendous. Let’s start with a pen-and-paper exam. First, the questions have to be set, answer options are to be set, correct (and unique) answer key must be identified. Then the question papers may be translated into multiple languages, printed, sealed, transported to every part of the country, received and stored in a secure place till the exam date. On the date of the exam, the question paper seal must be opened in each exam centre, sent to each room and distributed to students in time.
Invigilators must be briefed. During the exam, students must be watched very closely. After the exam, paper and answer sheets must be collected on time, accounted, sealed and sent to the control room of the exam centre. Then these documents are again transported to a common location under strict security, opened, scored, tabulated, verified and then the results are published. In the online exam model, most of the tasks are similar except for a few steps like printing the exam paper and the mode of conduct of examination.
It is important to note that typically there are thousands of people involved when you conduct a large exam and it takes between 90 to 180 days from the time the exam is announced and the results tabulated and declared. During this 6-month period, anyone of the 1,000-plus people involved can become a rogue participant and get sold out to a persistent organiser and the whole exercise is compromised.
It is also important to note that gaming is a big business today because of the low odds of winning. There are experts working with coaching centres who use the latest technology, spend a lot of time and money figuring out the weakest link in the system. It is a fact that gamers are always one step ahead of the testing agency. It is impossible to build a fool-proof system when the stakes are so high and the scale is so huge.
Schooling System
The root cause of the entrance test scam is our schooling system. If everyone passes class 10 and 12, what is the sanctity of the exam? Our school assessment system in class 10 and class 12 has completely failed and kicks up anyone with minimum capability. The numbers are huge at the class 12 level despite significant school dropouts in class 8 and 10. Let us look at some statistics on pass percentage.
In the Bihar State Board, students need to score just 21 marks (30%) in theory and 12 (30%) marks in practical to be declared as passed. On average, approximately 80% of the total candidates pass the Bihar Board 12th exams every year. In 2024, in Tamil Nadu, the class 12 pass rate was 94.56%, in Telangana, it was a moderate 64.19% but in UP, it was 82% and in West Bengal, it was 90%. The ICSE results were even more amazing. In 2024, the ICSE or class 12 pass rate was 99.47% while CBSE class 12 students had an 88% pass rate.
All State boards, CBSE and ICSE are competing with each other to pass almost every student up into the college system. In short, our school system assessment in class 10 and 12 has failed. Anyone who puts in minimal effort can pass. All these people end up in the entrance exam market for the college system with very little knowledge or capability but with a lot of aspirations. This has severe consequences.
Impossible Odds
Some 14 lakh students take JEE main for 57,000 joint counselling seats for IIT, NIT etc and 23 lakh students take NEET for 1 lakh MBBS seats (4% win rate in both cases), 71,000 register for CLAT exams for 4,600 National Law School seats (6% win rate), 2.9 lakh take CAT for 5,500 IIM seats (1.9% win rate). When I took JEE in 1974, there were approximately 1 lakh exam takers for 1,500 seats (1.5% win rate). Clearly, the odds were against the youth for many years but the scale of exams has multiplied.
Aspiring Parent
Every parent wants the best but fears that his child will somehow end up a pauper without any meaningful career. While the children are in 2024, parents still live in the last century and believe that career options are limited to computer science and medicine This narrow focus of parents has made life very difficult for their children. Parents want their child to achieve what they could not. So even though the child barely passed class 12, the parents want the child to sit for NEET and JEE or equivalent AIEEE or NCLAT. This happens every year, in every family, with their teenage child.
(The author is serial entrepreneur and independent journalist)
