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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"."
That's a lot of work for something that really doesn't matter that much. I mean sure, grades are important, but they're not so important you can't wait until Monday to see your results.
SMS =160 chars max *100,000 messages per hour *11 hours 176,000,000 bytes /11 /60 /60
=4444 bytes per second
*8
=35555 bits per second
= about the speed of a modem.
that's not a sms or tech problem at all.
it's just a bribery/corruption problem.
if the officials holding the exam are paid off succesfully what does it matter HOW the right answers end up on the cheaters papers?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm tired of all the India Shining crap. Being an Indian myself, its embarassing to see my fellow countrymen gloating over this as an example of India Shining. STFU. And posting on slashdot aint a status symbol. Now that I've posted its a pity I cant mod down these idiots.
It's "you", not "u".
What can YOU do with that?
Take a wild guess as to what I can do with all this. Ever heard of social engineering?
I could care less, but for someone who is in India it might prove rather useful.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I've talked to some Indian friends of mine in school about what school is like in India. It's a whole different game there. You basically have 3 options; engineering, business and "other". You don't want to end up in the other part. You must be an engineer (computer programmer et all) or business person and it all rides on your grades. I asked about people interested in art and other similar topics and going to college for something like that just is not an option. In fact they don't have those degress really.
They would talk about how it is not fun at all but is the way it is. Hell, being a teacher or professor is actually looked down upon, it's amazing.
My problems with this approach is it seems like people get very 1-dimensional educations and are not put into fields they are good at. Creativity is pushed aside and it's only about numbers. But then again, the "best" wil get through. I think as far as outsourcing goes, this has to be looked at. They really do have a lot of people, and I mean a lot, going for the type of software engineering and IT jobs many of us are looking for.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Better to have a field on the exam (or in a student directory service) where you can enter a cellphone number. When there is a score to report, the database atomatically sends an sms to that number.
Saves all the hazzle with a SMS-query interface.
We have a system like this in Sweden. Works perfect.
If these are end-of-high school exams, no wonder the Indians are taking all of the technical jobs! The amount of math and science knowledge they're expected to have is amazing compared to what it is here. Take a look at the New York regents exam content and compare it to the samples on the Indian website:
http://www.nysedregents.org/testing/hsregents.ht ml
When I have a kid, I'm turning it into an education robot...it will do nothing but study from pre-school onward. It's the only way for us to stay competitive.