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

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes you have to do the needful to get into the school you want.

Or just buy degree

[anvilmark]

Nothing I hear about education fraud in India surprises me since one of my Indian coworkers explained how people "buy" degrees from Indian universities.
University employees can be bribed to create the records for an entire curriculum, spanning multiple years of attendance. This record is indistinguishable from a valid one and generates a real diploma. The University will confirm education because "it's in the system".
I think he said it cost about $3000 USD or so for a Masters degree.

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.

Re:not even hacking just URL typing with fixed ID

[garcia]

Back in late 2009 and early 2010 I was scraping jail inmate registry records for Scott and Dakota County, MN. This was simply a script which incremented the ID numbers by one several times a day and put them out into a CSV. I uploaded these to Google Docs and had Docs Widgets build simple charts based on those data for a rolling ~6 month window of inmates.

As I started looking deeper into the data I started noticing I had ages lower than 18. Odd I thought but sure enough, Scott County was including their juvenile records in the data mixed with the adults even though it wasn't shown on their public website.

I contacted the County and they fixed the bug (you can read about that here: http://www.lazylightning.org/scott-county-quickly-fixes-juvenile-jail-roster-issue) but I was still surprised at the relative lack of security for juvenile records:

Within mere minutes of my e-mail they were on the phone with me and informed me they closed the hole. After mentioning that the only way someone may have been able to retrieve a juvenile record is if they âoeguessedâ the booking number, I replied that the booking numbers are sequential and thus âoeguessingâ is as simple as incrementing by 1. After our short discussion they asked me to let them know immediately if I noticed anything else with their data and the call was ended.

It's surprising how lax security is anywhere and to the poster elsewhere in this thread that said this is what you get when you outsource to India, this particular web stuff was not performed with outsourced talent so that comment was nothing short of asinine.

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.

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.)