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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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
I am definitely happy that my country is catching up. I thought I made my point pretty clear when I said, this isn't an example of India Shining. IT touches a minisucle of India's population and the Indian elections are proof that the majority of the population who vote haven't been touched by the economic properity which we seem to associate with India nowadays.
Go read up on post-election analysis as to why one of the stalwarts of India's IT boom, Chandrababu Naidu got kicked out by his electorate. Lot more issues which effect Indians than IT and the earlier we realise that and start addressing them the better. At the same time,I do agree that the money coming in because of IT helps in alleviating those basic problems.
But we still have a long way to go before we can say India's Truly Shining.
To answer your last point, I love my country. Its just that having the second largest population in the world causes a lot of bs to filter thru.
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
See the problem with this India Shining thing is that you still have over half a billion people who are poverty stricken. The last time I was in Delhi (addmitidly about ten years ago) I saw homeless people everywhere. The sidewalks were crammed with people who didn't have anything to eat, or any place to live. I'm sure things have come along since then, but India's middle class is still less than 200 million people. With a population of one billion people, this still leaves a lot of people under the poverty line. I'm Pakistani, so I've seen the plight of the urban and rural masses. As much as developing countries catch up to the west, a majority of their population still lives in poverty. Untill this issue can be addressed, I think everyone should keep their ego under controll.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.