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"."

Comments

Just imagine the traffic...

[Advocadus Diaboli]

...if you could get the answers for the exam by SMS during the exam. :-)

Re:Just imagine the traffic...

[gl4ss]

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?

Wow

[Loonacy]

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.

Re:Wow

[manavendra]

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%)

and the thoughput is:

[dominux]

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.

India...

[Viceice]

There seems to be a lot of talk about India on SlashDot lately. Are the editors being outsourced there too?

Way off the record!

[dnnrly]

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.

Too Open

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Too Open

[thodu]

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.

When the SMS is incorrect

[Rurouni Joe]

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

Try 100,000 messages in 5 seconds

[jpatokal]

This is newsworthy more from a societal than a technological point of view. 100,000 messages per hour (=27 msg/s) is chicken feed for your typical SMSC, which usually measure traffic in hundreds of SMSes per second. There are even SMS bulk delivery tools that plug directly into SS7 and claim a throughput of 20,000 messages per second. Working in the industry myself (at a competitor, mind you) I'm a little skeptical about this particular claim, but I do know that there are SMSC networks out there capable of handling sustained loads of several thousand msg/s.

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.

Can your Indian beat my Indian?

[Vertex Operator]

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?