Slashdot Mirror
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"."
...if you could get the answers for the exam by SMS during the exam. :-)
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.
Err...that is not racism. Granted racism may also be present along with anger about outsourced jobs they do not really go hand in hand. Even if you wanted to associate some sort of prejudice with anger over outsourcing (which you do seem to want) then it would be a form a nationalistic discrimination. Really all it comes down to is looking out for your own interests.
vampirical
that's good use of the technolgy....
otherwise it would have been so painful for students to wait till monday to get their results from School!!
It shows that indians are making use to the technolgy in their day to day lives and yes, the network can support it!!!
Yes, India is shining!!
I would love a service like this for US Colleges. Currently I have to go through various problems with postcards and other bull trying to get grades sooner then a month after the semester ends. Though currently there are some online grade services but not many teachers use them so maybe I should be complaining about the lazy luddite professors.
vampirical
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.
I'm sure IT managers in India must chuckle to themselves when they see discussion of the dreaded "Slashdot effect".
A one-off hit of 100,000 SMS hits per hour on a site would be newsworthy and probably site-melting just about anywhere else, but in India it's just another day at the office.
If it isn't already, Indian IT infrastructure should be THE reference testing ground for application scalability and load testing. Doesn't matter if it's systems for voting in elections, distributing exam results, traffic information, drought/flood information - if your system works in India, it's pretty much guaranteed to work anywhere else in the world from a load/stress perspective.
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.
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?
My Favourite Meme
I've been out to India twice for business trips (mostly in Bangalore) and you cant help noticing the contrast between the rich and educated in the tech industries and the incredibly poor people in the same city. Of course there are a lot of inbetween people as well, but the contrast between the extremes is scary.
Considering a mobile phone is an expensive bit of kit (if you get it "free" you pay for it over a few years on calls) you have to wonder if most people can afford a mobile phone.
There seems to be a lot of talk about India on SlashDot lately. Are the editors being outsourced there too?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
No I'm not. I said that if you want to call it a form of discrimination than at least call it the correct closest form, which is not racism.
vampirical
Well, if you're on Verizon Wireless, you can email yournumber@vtext.com. I'm sure the other providers offer a similar service.
The "mail" command is your friend.
vi ~/.emacs
Incidentally
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=cbseresul ts.nic.in
cbseresults.nic.in was running Microsoft-IIS on Windows 2000 when last queried at 24-May-2004 08:16:18 GMT
*sigh*
This year, election result updates were also available through SMS.
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.
If you go to the page, and click on exam results, you can enter a roll number.
Roll numbers starting with 12 seem to work, and in less than a minute I had the results of 5 students. Complete names, grades, pass/fail status.
This would never fly in the US. There are laws against the publication of this type of data (apparently)
You used the word "nationalism". The notion of a "nation", classically, is tightly linked to that of "race": a nation is a group of people who share certain characteristics: race, language and a homeland. This linkage hasn't evaporated from the folk usage of the term in the USA: Americans, for example, popularly judge Hispanics to be "non-whites" in general, regardless of actual skin pigmentation.
Are you adequate?
1211323 is a better one...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Below is a link to a story of teenager who commited suicide after receiving an sms telling her she had failed, when in reality she had passed. It just goes to show the pressures some of these teenagers face in India today.
news.com.au
1234567 is the guy who will take your job...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Just so that we don't get all gung ho over the news, here's a very sad story.. A girl committed suicide when she got a result over SMS that she had failed. She had in fact passed the exams.
My mom never taught me to sign.
But it's neat anyway. Then again, I thought it was pretty nifty to be able to call me university's automated service and get my results via phone 10 years ago... although I'm sure that little wait between "You have..." and "passed" was put there on purpose!.
Cheers,
-j.
I think thats OK - even when the results are put up on bulletin boards (physical one's) everyone can see all the results.
Watch Out!!
I acknowledge that India has a huge population, with many cities that have over a million inhabitants, but... they don't all have broadband Internet access do they?
This is not a sig
And this is relevant because...?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I think this might have been more interesting on Slashdot if we could have gotten some more details. What systems and programming languages did they use? What development methodologies? What unique problems did they face and how did they solve them?
;)
:-)
That would have been an interesting read (and a sure way to start "my language is better than yours" flamewars
This headline trivia is just...meh.
Incidentally, I was involved in a project dealing with SMS processing. It was the worst thing I have ever seen. Several development teams had worked on it and then quit or burned out. We got the task of trying to save it before the last bits of funding were cut.
An enormous Oracle database with around 50 tables (all with obscure nondescriptive names), most of them were not used anymore but remained because something just might break if you deleted them, they tables did not have proper keys, foreign keys or normalisations. The code itself was several HUNDRED java classes. Most were not used (same story with as with the DB tables, you could not be sure you didn't break anything by removing them). Actually what did all the work in the system was basically a single huge class, 4000 lines or so of procedural code written in java. The whole class was a single main method (no additional methods to speak of), consisting of an infinite loop with nested if/switch/try/catch/loop constructs. Lots and lots of cut and paste, empty catch statements, repeated string comparisons instead of final variables, messages built with String instead of StringBuffer, thread concurrency issues, many short lived database connections without a pool, etc etc etc etc. Almost every bad programming error you could think of.
There were almost no documentation or comments in the code. Once we understood the state of the mess we tried to tell the customer that their demands ("You MUST get this working in a couple of weeks! We told or sponsors we would be able to do a demo!") were impossible, but they wouldn't listen. Our relationship with them did not end well and they refused to pay us money for the time we spent. The project remained a mess of course.
But do you think they got their funding cut? No...becuase it was public sector money, so they got a firm admonishment to do better and kept getting money they wasted. Tax payer money... (Swedish tax payer, so no need to get angry if you live in another country. I you are a fellow Swede, please be furious.) So off they went to hire more consultants who would save them this time.
I'd better post anon this time, I think you can guess why.
So, that's my story of how to do it wrong. I would have liked to see how the Indians did it right.
Browsing the site I came across a results page:s p
http://cbseresults.nic.in/class12/cbse12.a
it asks for a 7 digit number, and within 3 attempts i found a working one: 1228540
Roll No: 1228540
Name:
SREEJA SURENDRAN
Mother's Name: BHARATHI SURENDRAN
Father's Name: SURENDRAN NAIR
and from their i can continue harvesting information and school scores for my devilish purposes:
Roll No: 1228539
Name:
SNIGDHA THAKUR
Mother's Name: BITHI THAKUR
Father's Name: RAVINDRA NATH THAKUR
I guess privacy isn't that big of an issue to them
This is slightly OT, but everybody's talking about how little bandwidth these messages actually take up.
My question is, why do SMS's cost so damned much? For a max of 160 bytes of data, the phone companies charge an unbelievable amount! It's something like a tenth of a second worth of voice traffic, but they're not priced accordingly. Is there a technical reason for this or, (more likely) are the phone companies just money-grubbing rat bastards?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I completely agree with your post. Infact, I was myself stumped when I was busy haggling with this cart vendor, and his cell phone rang. He picked up, apparently talked to a buyer who wanted him to keep the vegetables ready so that he can just drive up and pick up everything.
You have your own e-tailer here.
1226282 will be the one doing your surgery, next time you're in hospital
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Go to
http://cbseresults.nic.in/class12/cbse12.htm
Enter 1200003
GRADE
301 ENGLISH CORE 087 A1
041 MATHEMATICS 095 A1
042 PHYSICS 097 A1
043 CHEMISTRY 095 A1
044 BIOLOGY 097 A1
500 WORK EXPERIENCE --- A2
502 PHY & HEALTH EDUCA --- A2
503 GENERAL STUDIES --- A2
Can anyone find another Indian that beats my
Indian?
San Diego Padres, 100 Park Blvd, San Diego CA 92101
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by
talking about privacy, maybe you shouldn't have posted the COMPLETE details here on slashdot.
;-)
the possibility of just guessing roll numbers has been noted before in this thread but the author was kind enough not to post the personal data!!!
well, now these kids can be googled for, that's not so bad either
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
MO (mobile originating) SMS maxes out at about 300 messages/hour.
... er ... I don't have words to describe that.
Really?
That's some 13 bytes of payload per second. I don't care what the framing is or what encryption layers there are, but to have a system such as that working in 200X is
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
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.
I heard a girl killed herself because she got an SMS saying she had failed. She had actually passed.
It's nice to see an example of something useful with SMS instead of the normal bad-mouthing of the technology by the media who seem to think it's nothing more than a toy for school kids to play with and spend their parents money.
Oh wait, it's that too isn't it? =)
And I think that anyone who went to school understands the 'need to know' involved with testing like this. The older you get, the easier it is to forget all the stresses that we do put on kids in light of our own daily stress.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
because India's govt. makes a lot of noise about open source, and I was wondering if they are putting their money where their mouth is.
According to the Herald Sun, one 17 year old student killed herself after the computers sent her the wrong sms telling her that'd she'd failed while she'd in fact past. (sorry a repost because my a href didnt work properly)
obviously, they mean for nerds of European decent.
That's a lot of work for something that really doesn't matter that much.
You are either trolling, or are just unaware of how important final-year school exams can be, and how seriously they are taken. This is the case in many countries throughout the world; it's in no way specific to India or to developing nations.
Here in Ireland these exams are the most important you will ever do and count as a fairly pivotal point in your life. How many points you get in your final school exams determine what course you do and in what university, and from that what you do for your career. (There is a fixed number of places on each course, and students compete for entry on the basis of highest exam points.)
People get enormously concerned about the results; other posters have already pointed out the suicide of a girl who erroneously thought she had failed, and this is only one of thousands of exam-related suicides in India around this time of year.
So yes, I think students would like to know the results as soon as possible.
telling her that'd she'd failed while she'd in fact past. (sorry a repost because my a href didnt work properly)
;-)
Well you fixed your HREF but your spelling seems to suffered for it. The cosmic balance is restored
That second one is interesting since the father's name is pretty much Rabindranath Tagore. I wonder if it's fake. Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Part of the reason for high SMS cost is because the GSM network wasn't really meant to handle such traffic in the first place. SMS was built in as an extra feature, primarily for operator notification services (voice mail, overage warning...)
:-)
A GSM base station channelises the radio bandwidth into eight main voice channels and a few low-bandwidth signal channels. SMS is carried on top of one of the low-bandwidth signal channels, not in the main voice channels.
Therefore, even if there is ample bandwidth available on the voice channels, the SMS is constrained in a much smaller channel which can quickly be overloaded. And channel assignment is static: the only way to expand the channel is to install a new base station!
Add to that the fact that one SMS message provides 140 bytes of *reliable* traffic (i.e. 160 characters in 7-bit GSM encoding), but the real traffic can be much more because the reliability necessitates acknowledgments / retransmissions.
These are the technical reasons that I've heard of. Now phone companies could as well just be "money-grubbing rat bastards".
In spite of all these inadequacies, SMS remains a killer even at this price for one simple reason: interoperability and reliability. It just plain works, across operators and handsets and network vendors.
Wow. I thought we only used CDMA here in the 'states. GSM is a growing market, but none of the GSM providers (the largest being AT&T/Cingular) has the coverage that the largest CDMA provider (Verizon) has. Do they use CDMA in India due to the size of the country?
The OP is right, more or less.
He's talking about a single MO device, but obviously one without more-messages-to-send enabled (or the network doesn't support it).
There is a little more to a cellular network than just sending short messages. 300/hr (I've clocked it higher than that, BTW, but I can't remember the exact figure.. Somewhere around 500 IIRC) is about the upper bounds of how fast you can type on those friggin' keypads anyhow.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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.
I can hear a lot of cell phones being smashed. Will be a good business for cell phone manufacturers.
Working in the industry myself, I'm trying to find phones which work with North American GSM frequencies and supports GSM 03.42 (or whatever its called nowadays) Huffman Compression for interoperability testing.
Anybody know of any?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
The GRE is the standard test for admission to graduate school. There is a lot of pressure surrounding this test, as well. But rather than having to wait to get our results, we know exactly what we got at the very end for two of the three sections (the third section is writing, and it takes a few weeks before we find out).
It seems to me that this method is way better than having to distribute based on some centralized service.
Also, competition for graduate school is just as bad as in India. I applied to two schools only to find out that over 3000 had applied to a school that was only accepting 100. If you don't have the numbers, they won't even look at the application.
Some colleges already have this. Ohio State certainly does. We have a "View Grades" thing we can look at any time on the osu.edu webpage. You can also look at your grades for any other quarter you attended. As soon as the profs enter your grade it shows up. I've had grades appear within a day of the final, and all grades have to be turned in within a week or less of finals.
I'm not sure this site has the best security out there. Enter a 7 digit number (for example, starts with 1 and ends with 7, hint, hint) to see someone elses marks. Not good.
I live in a country where sending SMS messages is part of the daily life. In the Philippines, SMS traffic averages more than 20 a day. At more than 5 million GSM phone users, SMS traffic amounts to about 100 million SMS messages per day.
Sad, seriously sad.
More than mere navel gazing.
It's probably not an issue for surnames mentioned here (Malayali and North Indian respectively), but for ethnicities such as mine, I believe surname privacy is a very serious issue, and it's time gov.in does something about securing access.
More than mere navel gazing.
Don't get me wrong, I think the (I)IIT's and all research institutes are deeply into OSS, but governmental organisations (NIC, ERNET, ICAR, CMC etc).... mmay be not.
More than mere navel gazing.
I probably over evil-ised Thakurs :-), which certainly wasn't my intention, I have a lot of Thakur friends, but just to clarify that it certainly is not fake. OTOH, Rabindranath's surname is, indeed, an Anglicised version of the Indic 'Thakur'. Ironic that you should believe it's the opposite.
More than mere navel gazing.
Oh I'm named for Rabindranath Tagore myself I just though it was interesting that the father's first and last name were so close to the famous man. If I saw someone's father listed as Francis S. Key in the US I'd have the same suspicion.
RaviWhen the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
The Mallu connection is clear enough: Stallman's "GNU/communist manifesto" (not to be taken literally of course) appeals to them a lot. The majority of OSS adoption in Kerala is for philosophical than for pragmatic reasons. The Tamil Nadu govt. was also muddying its feet; I heard that TNEB switched (don't know if that meant servers or desktops) and some more stories too. From the central govt. side, there used to be a lot of news a year back (like http://atulchitnis.net/writings/oss-govt.php) but I haven't heard anything lately. And then of course there's the Abdul Kalam factor. Don't know if he can make any difference. On an unrelated note, a couple (perhaps more) of large banks are switching employees (yup, desktops) wholesale to linux this year.
After a while most math classes get to the point where answer tends to be 1, 0, or sqrt(2), so no, you don't really need a calculator.
On the other hand, to do most physics or engineering problems, you definitely need a calculator. Although usually they want you to arrange the problem symbolically first before plugging in the numbers, so you can get almost full marks even if you mess up the calculation.
On my last midterm of University (Telecom Engineering) I forgot my calculator, and had to do factorials and long division by hand. And it still wasn't that hard...probably because I hadn't relied on it in the past.
First off, if they're sending full results, they're probably close to the maximum message size.
Secondly, as everyone else has pointed out, there's huge overhead in all the many, many layers that the message passes through. And this is actually much WORSE - percentage wise - with small payloads.
I still agree that the throughput isn't that amazing. BUT, the fact that the system didn't crash still is.
As most cell providers are in business to make money, they're not going to provide for the maximum possible worst-case usage at every single link in the chain. Check out erlang.com for some info on blocking probability and resource assignment. So if there's all of a sudden a huge spike in traffic that wasn't anticipated when the system was last upgraded, there should be some blockages. I'd expect more in the centres that handle the message switching than in actual over the air bandwidth.
Also, there is probably only once or twice a year where the school system has to deal with this sort of think, and its the first time they're doing it this way. I think the most impressive part of the whole thing is that their database stood up to it. Electronic registration/grade checking systems are still pretty shit, in my experience with a few Canadian Universities. I even had the extreme displeasure of trying to interface a program to one of the beasts *shudder*.
that's a girl for your information
If the study was on how many SMS messages were sent DURING the testing- I keep hearing about how loose Asians are with cheating, and this would prove it.
CBSE {Central board of secondary education} is a type of educationl system catering to indians all over india unlike state schools.
.A guy who gets 60% in State schools gets admission easier {ofcourse there is an entrance exam into consideration which focusses state curricvulum} and CBSE guys are having a totally different curriculum which is more practical oriented and relatively less to stuuf thing onto mind.
..
The Reason why the gal might have felt bad abt her marks is becuz of the
Extreme compettition to get admission to colleges.Exams conducted by state schools are the basis for admission into a college in the state.They dont care abt the score that a CBSE guy achieves. only Birla Institute of Technology takes CBSE high school results for admission , althought it takes scores for state schools as well.
That s why CBSE guys find it hard to get admission into local and national colleges.They are usually brighter , {most of the IIT guys are CBSE guys} and so failure in CBSE stream is too much of a pressure
Inshort CBSE guys in INdia are
brighter than state school guys , Lesser number of colleges for them , extreme compettition
and obviously , the gal seems to have strained a bit too much and less emotional support from parents
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
Why is this insightful? The OP said we are going to hear racist jokes that involve outsourcing. mphase says the jokes we hear aren't going to be racist. Are the mods illiterate, or does mphase have psychic that the mods know about and I don't? If he hasn't heard the jokes yet, how can he know that they aren't going to be racist?
You may think that someone is going to post an impolite response to this, but I actually can insightfully tell you that the response won't be impolite.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I understand that one of them was an impressive rhyming orator, but he had a bit of a lisp. His name? Tupac Thakur. :-)
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
This is outright infuriating!!!! (And thank goodness I'm not from India so I don't have to deal with this very unfortunate problem.)
I could theoretically write an automated script to brute-force the entire database and submit any possible combination of a "roll number" and collect so much data that the heads of their government officials would be spinning if it gets publicized......
The only recourse for those who fail is to become Islamic clerics, Evangelists, or scam artists- among other things.
I'm talking about Nigeria, but I'm sure it's the same all over West Africa, the competition in secondary school is absolutely overwhelming, and the examinations are incredibly difficult, far above the standard of education in most schools.
This means that attending certain secondary schools almost guarantees failure.
By the way, something similar has been done in Nigeria for the J.A.M.B examinations.
Shinsengumi de gozaru
Why wait for information when you can get it now? And probably it's easier for most to get them by SMS than look at some board at their school or whatever means they use to communicate the grades.