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

in jail by the end of the day

[MickyTheIdiot]

This would be true in the US and the UK, and India doesn't even match up to those "high" standards. He'll be in jail because someone with power will be embarrassed by this.

That was a great article..

[3.5 stripes]

More for the discussion of statistics than for the really sad excuse for security on those pages..

outsourcing to india

[Joe_Dragon]

this is the type of coding that you get in India stuff done on the cheap and likely to coded to spec with no thinking about how bad of a idea this is.

Re:and how many people just cramed the test

[jkflying]

Why don't you just read the fucking article instead of trying to come up with your own wackjob explanation? He quite clearly explains it:

One of the most common critiques of my theory was this - maybe there were questions with only 3 or 4 mark intervals in all subjects making certain marks mathematically unattainable. My counterargument? All numbers from 94 to 100 are attainable and have been attained. What does this mean? It means that increments of 1 to 6 are attainable. By extension, all numbers from 0 to 100 are achievable.
Let me give you an example. If 99 and 98 were definitely achievable with deductions of 1 and 2 respectively, this means one of two cases - there is a question A worth 1 mark that made 99 occur, and a question B worth 2 maks that made 98 occur, which meant getting A and B both wrong would mean 97 could occur. Case 2 - Question A was worth 1 mark, and question B was worth 1 mark too. The 99 got A wrong, and the 98 got A and B wrong. By this logic, if 97 were not possible, it would mean that there is no other question of 1 mark in the examination or that nobody got a 2 point question wrong and question A or B.

Basically, because 99, 98 and 97 were all attained, then any increment of 1, 2 or 3 points should be possible. The fact that nobody got 80% in any subject in the entire country points to widespread tampering.

The Author is an Idiot

[raehl]

Possibilities:

- There is a national cheating conspiracy ...or....

- The test score is not based on assigning a value to each question and adding up those values.

For example, the test could simply be scored as such:

All answers correct: Score 100
Miss one question: Score 99
Miss two questions: 98
Three questions: 97
Four: 96
Five: 94
Six: 92
etc etc
Miss 20 questions: 35
Miss 21 questions: 31
etc etc.

The author makes the ASSUMPTION that the score of the test must be the sum of the value of the questions answered correctly. There is no basis for that assumption. The fact that certain values are not present, and the values 34, 33 and 32 are not present, are likely by design (i.e. don't make people feel like they just missed passing.)

All the author has shown is that India is apparently doing a very poor job teaching critical thinking skills (as evidenced by the author's inability to exercise critical thinking skills.)