Hacker Exposes Evidence of Widespread Grade Tampering In India

Okian Warrior writes "Hackaday has a fascinating story about Indian college student Debarghya Das: 'The ISC national examination, taken by 65,000 12th graders in India, is vitally important for each student's future: a few points determines which university will accept you and which will reject you. One of [Debraghya]'s friends asked if it was possible to see ISC grades before they were posted. [Debraghya] was able to download the exam records of nearly every student that took the test. Looking at the data, he also found evidence these grades were changed on a massive scale."

Comments

Education in India

[cfulton]

I lived in India for a year. What I can tell you of the eduction system there is that it is not the juggernaut of higher ed that we are told it is in America. I had one person working for me as a developer who had a degree in Computer Science. We were getting ready to set up some servers with our application server software. He was very excited since he had taken several courses in UNIX but had never actually been on one. They had done all the course work with pen and paper:

What does "ls -l" do? Please describe below.

That kind of thing. So, I'm not surprised if institutions are manipulating test scores. India is more about the perception of computer savvy developers than the reality of it.

Re:and how many people just cramed the test

[CurunirAran]

The Indian system of education doesn't work like that. Here's a post I made on another forum: You can theoretically attain all marks in the 0-100 range because there is no scaling up. Each paper has components that together total upto a 100. For example, there could be 10 1-mark questions, 15 2-mark questions, 4 3-mark questions, 3 4-mark questions and 6 6-mark questions. Each question can be graded to a fraction of it's worth. So you can get 1.5 on a 2-mark question, 0.5 on a 3-mark question, etc. Thus theoretically, all possible combinations of scores are possible. The absence of certain scores is evidence of tampering. SOURCE: I appeared for the CBSE exams last year. The system is similar, though not the same.

Why is this surprising?

[prattle]

If the author is surprised (by the grades, not the security), it is because he has never been a teacher.

1. Teachers have to ensure that their class marks have a certain average and median before they submit them. There can't be too many failures either.

2. Teachers know not to give a grade of 49 if the pass is 50 since the student will argue to get that missing point. If you want to be safer, just don't give out anything in the forties.

3. If a test gives letter grades, that equates to a particular number. A = 85, A- = 83, and so on. In that case, no one gets an 84, ever.