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Secondary Exam Results In India Mean An SMS Flood
syrinje writes "The Times of India reported that Indian high-school seniors who took the exams conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education sent more than a Million SMS messages within a 11 hour period to query the result database and receive detailed examination results. In addition making the results available to cellphone users, the CBSE has also published the results online at a dedicated web-site . Since the results were announced on the weekend, students would otherwise have had to wait for Monday to get their results from their schools. A spokesperson for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited , one of the operators involved in setting up the SMS result system estimated that they handled 100,000 messages per hour during the day on Sunday and said that "There was no problem in the network due to the heavy SMS traffic and we were able to give subjectwise marks to the students"."
I understand this might be interesting, considering all of them came from the same source, but for a country so large as India it should not really be a big deal, one million SMS. In Czech Republic thats a pretty much a daily standard for one of the three cell networks and thats a country with only 10 million people. Last Christmas there was over 10 million SMS in about one evening. So, what I am trying to say, considering they have about 100 times more people, they should prepare for much larger loads in the future.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
This would be funny, 'cept that it isn't. There is no Calcutta Tech. You might mean the Indian Institute of Technology, Calcutta/Kharagpur, but then you'd still be a liar. Further, Shiva is part of the Holy Trinity, which consists of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. If you praise the Destroyer, u start sounding like George Bush. Now u wouldn't want that, would u?
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New Year 2003/4 in the UK, 111 MILLION SMSs were sent between midnight 31 December and midnight 1 January, an average of 4.625 million/hour. In reality the first couple of minutes around 37.2 million were sent.
See here for details.
Not until an year ago. But last year, when Reliance launched their CDMA services, they made sure that *anybody* could buy one. Since then, Reliance have added 40 million subscribers. And thats in just one year. They were offereing LG/Samsung CDMA handset for Rs. 500/- which would be ~ 12 USD. Offcourse, their air-time usage charge was also *very low*. An CDMA to CDMA call would cost you Rs. 0.40 per minute. That could be less than 1 cent.
Answer to your header - yes. They can.
Expensive bit of kit? The cheapest mobile phone is available for US$50 in India. But if you buy it thru the commitment plans, you pay nothing for it. How is that expensive? Get opver the fucking contrast. There are 1 billion people living in India. There are lots of poor people, and there are lots of rich.
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While this may sound surprising to the western world, kids in India are under tremendous social, parental and peer pressure to perform well in exams, especially the Secondary (high school( exams, and for several reasons:
1. Your chances of getting even your application considered for admission in any college depend entirely upon the Secondary school results.
2. The Seconday exam results are seen as a measure of success and dedication of not only the kid, but the parents as well. Unlike the developed countries, it is extremely difficult for anyone to find a job without a college education. There aren't all that many alternative, yet well-paying streams to choose from.
3. With a population of a billion, competition is fierce over every single seat in every college. There are instances where more than 100 students compete for a single place, and even a tenth of a difference in high-school percentage can make a difference
4. Parents as well the kids are under pressure to make a showing of their emphasis and sincerity towards education. It is almost unthinkable for a parents that their kid would fail in Secondary - that's virtually a stigma on the entire family.
And finally, in typical Indian fashion, there are hearty celebrations and distribution of sweets if the kids score well (the definition of "well" means anything over 80 or 85%)
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Well, many vegetable-sellers* (the kind who have little push-carts full of vegetables) have cellphones now, so do many auto-rickshaw drivers.
/., is not a joke to most Indians).
Do most poor farmers have cellphones? Nope. As you pointed out, the extremes in India are astonishing. I believe this can be best explained by the fact that a lot of India is uneducated, has a feudal mindset, and believes that suffering is their destiny in life (Karma, however we use it on
That said, there are _lot_ of vegetable sellers and autorickshaw drivers in India, and they are usually classified as LIGs (Lower Income Groups). So it's sort of heartening to see how far we've come that many of them can afford a cellphone.
Btw, a cellphone could be had for as little as INR 1500, and a pay-as-you-go card that'd last a month can be got for INR 50-200. Not for the "poorest of the poor", but the urban poor can probably afford it.
*Btw, the reason the urban poor buy cellphones is because they get better business this way. For example, people can call a veggie seller up and get veggies on demand at home. Ditto autorickshaw drivers - parents are more likely to trust their kids (to drive them to/from school) to an autorickshaw driver who is always reachable via a cellphone.
In the UK, if your 'A' level results are marginal, you might have to apply to a different university than the one you originally applied for. It's called 'clearing'.
Knowing your results earlier allows you to jump straight into the clearing system, possibly allowing you to grab a place at a better university than if you'd waited until Monday.
Most universities (well at least the one I graduated from) would have an approved list of calculators, and you have to get your calculator certified before the exams. Calculators which don't have the ceritification sticker would result in the candidate being asked to leave the hall...
And last time I checked - I haven't heard of any sel respecting examiner who would allow mobile phones and pagers into his exam hall.
You are right. It is a privacy issue. But, here, in India, traditionally, the entire spreadsheet of all students is put up in a public place in the institute (college, school, board, wherever) for all to see. Therefore, it is not a big issue for somebody who has grown up here.
And banning calculators (in a math exam) is even less feasible
From google search, you can see that in India, calculators are banned in all school exams. You have to use log tables. For college exams, calculators are allowed.