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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"."
...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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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
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.
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
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)
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.