India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar | Hacker News Reader

India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

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53 pointsmohanrajn8472 comments

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolutely have an incentive to cheat. This is a political & cultural problem, but is absolutely solvable.

In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work as a big team, and it didn't matter whether it was homework, quizzes, projects, tests, or even their theses. They didn't consider it cheating at all, even though it absolutely was (except the homework, where partnership was usually encouraged). Everyone else knew they were cheating, but in the absence of professors willing to confront the problem, what is an honest student to do? Do you maintain your integrity at the risk of lower grades, or do you cheat, too, and ensure a high GPA?

I too noticed this in my graduate program. However the majority 70% were Chinese, and they did the same exact thing you say. They would come into the lecture hall early and plan out their seating arrangements for each and every exam. It was clearly noticeable they were cheating. I cant speak to Indian students as there was only one in the entire graduate program.

I'm not clear on how what the Indians are doing affects the GPA of the Chinese or Americans in your example. Do they blow the curve, maybe?

Also, Americans tend to put individual before group. I wonder if your example isn't so much cheating as a difference in culture.

It undermines the moral fabric of the society. It's not a coincidence that in India (or Bangladesh, where My family is from), you have to bribe someone to get your phone hooked up.

Ok, but I still am not clear about how this would affect the GPA of students who don't cheat.

Either because it is graded on a curve or because graduates are judged based on GPA. If you earned a fair and square 3.5 and a bunch of people cheated their way to a 3.7 you have a devalued 3.5.

It is cheating. The rules are quite clear, and these groups break those rules in a way that gives them an immediate and direct advantage over students who don't break the rules. The rules themselves may be subject to debate, but that these people engage in cheating really isn't.

They don't blow any curves necessarily but they do appear to be smarter or more able, and that impacts everything from teaching assignments to thesis committee solicitation.

Yeah, they would blow the curve. Most university require professors to have a certain average GPA for a given class. If all of the cheaters pass with flying colors due to cheating, then the people who would have looked good otherwise, now seem average and get a C instead of the A they deserve.

Cheaters, whether American or Indian or Chinese, ruin the educational experience of college. Universities really should take it much more serious than they currently do.

In the case of Microsoft Exams (at least when I took them a few years ago), I had the sense that there was an "arms race". Questions were made more difficult and obscure than they needed to be, in order to drive pass rates down...when the real issue was braindumps and more blatant forms of cheating in some parts of the world. Which creates more demand for braindumps.

I wouldn't be surprised if college instructors start doing this as well-make exams tougher to compensate for cheating, rather than dealing with cheating head-on.

Cheating in U.S. higher education is really a moral crisis, and the amount of accomodation for cheaters is shocking to me. I was bored one day and decided to read through the opinions of my school's honor board proceedings. You wouldn't believe the shit people got away with. One student plagerized most of his final paper from one of the professor's books. He said in his country that was a sign of respect! And he got away with that excuse!

This can happen. In India, you have this tradition of 'notes sharing'. Basically the course instructor circulates around lecture notes(Which is basically a highly trimmed version of the text book), all students do is mug up the whole thing and write it down in exams.

The person who gets it 100% right generally scores the highest. If you are some who does it a little differently by thinking and working your way through the course, you can be silently penalized for trying to be smarter than everyone else.

In South Africa some universities have introduced cameras into exam halls, but cheating is probably rampant at those that haven't. I've been in an exam where people in the next row (teachers no less, doing what seemed like an easy exam) were blatantly cheating. First world notions of "honour" and "integrity" don't gel well with third world aspirations.

Oh and South African Indian students (in the country for generations, and affluent relative to the rest of the population) are amongst the biggest cheats. A BCom (commerce) degree held by an Indian graduate from the the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is something to be viewed with great suspicion.

I decided to post this anonymously. I am a professor at a major CS program in the united states. And we have a very serious cheating problem with indian students. It's clearly cultural. We also see cheating at a fairly high rate among the chinese and students from a handful of middle eastern countries, but the indian students are way out in front: it drives our indian faculty nuts.

It seems that indian students have instilled in them a drive to help pull one another out of the abyss. This is probably a noble, and perhaps critical, characteristic for survival in a third world country. But for exams and particularly projects in US institutions, it translates directly into a high degree of unethical plagiarism and cheating. It damages the reputation of the department and the diplomas of our non-cheating students. We do not know what to do about it.

I used to hold up the American students as the example to follow, since for decades they have had instilled in them basic notions about the ethics of cheating. But that's changing too: the millennials cheat at a much, much higher rate than Americans did before. Helicopter parenting? Changes in school culture? I don't know, but we have a big, big problem there as well.

* Edit. Just to make it clear for those who would like to say "well, the Americans do it too now". While it's true the millennials cheat a lot more than Americans did in the past, it's still a very small fraction of the rate we're seeing in the indian students.

I was a (top 1%) student all the way through high school in the Indian education system, and our oppressive educational environment makes it far too stressful to perform within our parents' expectations. Even the top students collaborated with each other and "cheated" to ease the stress on ourselves. We also felt bad for weaker students who were struggling with material and being left further and further behind, without being given any time to actually understand the material, having to spend all the time memorizing stuff they didn't get so they could spew it out on exams, and would help them out too.

Tired of that system, I went on to attend Olin College of Engineering [0] in the US, the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I wrote a grand total of 1 time-constrained, closed-text written final exam in my 4 years there. Not a student, myself included, ever "cheated" at Olin, even though I had developed a habit of taking whatever means necessary to score higher on exams.

I realized that the reason why cheating didn't make sense at Olin was because everything I could have wanted to do to score higher was already allowed. I think the real solution is to build team-oriented finals and exams, with peer evaluation taking a sizeable chunk of the grade distribution, such that there is no longer an action that can be considered "cheating". In the real world, whether it's academia or industry or research, you are allowed to do anything that doesn't harm someone else to reach the answer you seek. I don't see why collaboration between students should be discouraged. Plagiarism is a different issue, and that can be addressed differently.

[0] http://www.olin.edu

I don't get it. Call them out. I hated dealing with the cheating at my school. I hated that their GPA got them the same considerations as mine.

The worst part was the lazy faculty that did nothing. I built a bit of a reputation around publically reprimanding students in class when they acted like brats. This was not my job and it alienated me from much of the of the student body.

Unfortunately I had to do it because my class would have never moved forward. So I guess it's not just my school? Professors have lost control all over and simple things like cheating have some kind of grey area?

FYI: Mostly Americans at my school.

I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK foreign students pay much higher fees than domestic students and are a significant source of revenue for universities. There may be pressure on academic staff not to jeopardise this arrangement by calling attention to cheating.

There are significant problems with cheating in UK universities too, particularly (but not only) with international students [1].

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/4...

The reason Indian students collaborate so much is because the way Indian education system works, hustling students survive better. Students who can read, share and gather information with peers always tend to do better than lone geniuses.

Also, the population ensures that there aren't enough resources for everyone. So, everyone learns to share. A lab project? Share!! You want to do a survey? Form a group and do it. Want computing resources? Share it with others in that time slot. Participating in competitions? All of them are team based competitions.

This is a cultural difference. Nothing else. Also, it's not like all the Indian kids are homogeneously helping each other. They all have their own cliques and many students don't want to share their solutions with other students (Indian or not). Many want to find a better solution.

The solution is simple (something the CS reps in my school implemented with great success). Make homework and (some) tests incredibly hard and encourage team work.

Some of the programming projects we had were so complex that the class had shared forums where we would solve problems right under the nose of the TAs and the prof with full visibility. So, while the code would be individually written, problem solving in the abstract can be a team effort.

An example of how to make them harder would be to deliberately introduce bugs in a codebase that you deployed for a homework. This teaches them how to find solutions and debug.

Sure, some students will chill until the last moment and try to gather answers from friends. But, most students who worked their ass off would never share their solutions (mostly to get themselves up the bell curve). A lot of students will try to make their solutions better by improving on the shared common answer but never revealing it to anyone but the grader.

For exams, we had open book, open laptop, full internet access tests. In those tests, all students would log into chat box to discuss answers. But the questions were tricky and needed speed to solve. So, being on the chat just made sure students are wasting time. The only people who could finish those tests were students who knew what they were doing.

I know this is not ideal in the US. But its a strategy (if used sparingly) that works really well. To be honest, it makes students be super prepared and study real hard so that they can complete tests faster, yet know that they can rely on their friends to get them some info if they happen to forget it.

I always found cheating to be much easier at US universities than back in the UK. Although maybe this was only my personal experience.

In the US you could often sit anywhere you liked in exams and have anything on you (cheat sheets were allowed for many exams, which I thought was an interesting concept to say the least).

In the UK, at least at my university, you had to leave all of your belongings by the side of the room and were only allowed a pen (and whatever else you needed for writing). Even your pockets had to be empty. It was also in a massive room with empty desks around you and a massive amount of space between every student as well as a handful of supervisors walking around making sure nothing fishy is going on. It definitely felt like a much more serious event than any exam I ever took in the US.

Well, in my case I never considered cheating as an excuse to anything. May be, I was lucky to born in a small country with 3 million people. I left my grades are to be an indication of how and where I spent studying. My grades are lower than the most other guys who explicitly cared about their grades. Even so, no one hasn't given me a shit about my low grades within 3 years of my career. May be because of in the end all what matters is that you do what you suppose to do good enough.

The whole Indian Education system reeks with strong attitude towards just getting grades & marks, discourages any innovative / critical thinking and to be honest, it is completely hopeless. The higher you climb, the more messed up it is. If any qualified person would be there to make the examination papers and to check them, in most of the engineering colleges here, I doubt even 20% would make it till the end. The questions are repetitive, quite general and purposely unspecific.

People buy reports, seminars, projects because they find it impossible to make it on their own. Cheating with so common and ingrained that it is something to boast about and not frowned upon by anyone, in fact, an average student believes that he has a moral right to cheat. Even the IITs which produce the smartest bunch are able to attract the smartest because of their 'brand' and not because of any intrinsic value they provide. The same story of typical Indian college applies to them.

The good news is, no of startups that are actually interested in someone's talent have grown in past few years. Someone like me, who found their 'path' through Internet, is lucky to be part of one of them. :)

On a much different scale, but an Indian outsourcing firm we do business with (Capgemini) gives our interview questions to subsequent candidates. Sometimes it's evident they are trying desperately to Google for answers during telephone interviews, and I've even noticed that there is sometimes someone else there feeding them with answers!

I didn't know Capgemini is doing much outsourcing in India.

A lecturer at my university is by Capgemini. Do you have any more good stories?

It's technically a French company, but they have an incredible 50,000+ employees in India.

There was one development candidate I was interviewing who was speaking to himself in hushed tones, during the interview '...google...sql join...', 'YES, YES, JUST A MINUTE SIR', '...next page...no, no..ah..' etc. Quite ridiculous.

I have to interview about 20 shortlisted people to find 1 decent developer. Problem is it's difficult to use CVs/resumes to shortlist, since many are complete fabrications.

Normally I would say "what's wrong with knowing what to Google for and getting the right answer in a short enough time span to seem like a reasonable response to your dev question" since that's how many devs (who actually get stuff done) work. However, it's hilarious because the internet speeds are so slow in India that they probably would be better off actually spending the time in front of a reference book than waiting for their browser to crawl through Google.

I've no issue with using Google (or whatever your favourite search engine happens to be) in day-to-day work. But in an interview setting, and especially for extremely basic questions, it's completely inappropriate.

Regarding Internet speed, India has seen phenomenal infrastructure changes in the past decade. Internet speed in this particular office in Mumbai is very fast.

Fast connections are available in major cities, for consumers as well as businesses. There are a number of ISPs in Mumbai offering ADSL and FTTH connections (I've only just got FTTC where I am in the UK!).

Hey Gordon, I'm fascinated by your challenges with scaling applicant evaluations.

Could I learn more about it? We conduct blind auditions at scale for companies and it's a problem we're keen to learn more about.

Could we connect?

Why do you continue to work with them?

I don't have a choice. I've previously had much more successful engagements with companies in China and India, so would gladly change if it was up to me.

However, I work in a large organisation, and even if my direct manager agrees with me, those above him honestly couldn't give a shit what we think.

Not sure if relevant, but when I was in 10th Grade, the teachers helped all of us in the exams. They didn't want to tarnish the image of the school by having a low-pass result.

Yes, India.

This can happen anywhere. I remember my old high school math teacher helping the star math pupil get a higher score on the AIME[1] and then again on the IMO[2]. The student was suspected of cheating and, thankfully, given a second chance to take the exam again (don't remember which one) without the teacher present.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Invitational_Mathemati... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_Olym...

How does one cheat in IMO? Is your high school teacher your country's IMO team leader?

Maybe it was a qualifying test? I don't know, it was held in the school.

Its sometimes amazing when I see other indian student ( being from south asia myself ) outsource their report writing back home from university in england.

Sometimes I sit in lectures and the the person besides me have 5+ years experience working in IT with a bachelors from India competing with 18-19 year old people.

That picture of students hanging from the windows of exam hall is hilarious and sad. Though it is not representational of India on the whole. The state of Bihar has been notorious when it comes to 'cheating' in exams (besides heightened levels of crimes in every other field).

The title of the article leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The premier universities in India have a much more robust system of conducting exams. More than a decade ago, the exam paper was supposedly leaked before the exam. The exam, which is conducted all over India, was cancelled and re-conducted. That was quite a feat.

However, on the -ve side, there are political leaders who have encouraged 'cheating' by abolishing laws against such acts.

Smaller depiction of a larger malaise. Indian education system is simply the tip of the ice berg. The government and educational systems are just the small front face of corruption, that is in the Indian society today. The corruption you see in the form of exchange of money is minuscule when compared to moral corruption which has infected everyone here.

Unfortunately you are likely to face far more worse kind of corruption even at workplaces, even in Multi national corporations in India. Religious, linguistic and regional politics is very common. If you are really hard working and productive, expect yourself to be exploited. You will go on working only to find worthless people get promoted and rewarded. Every single section of the India society is simply looking for a easy way to get ahead even if that means blatantly cheating your way through. Given these circumstances its hardly surprising why good people just want to move out settle outside India.

Yup, and it only makes it that much harder for Indian students who want to separate themselves from the herd and try to be honest hard-working individuals.

As someone from Bihar, there is a pattern to this cheating. Certain years, the Govt. decides to clamp down hard and exams happen under Election like security and certain years you have free for all cheating.

Also Bihar has a very small number of engineering colleges (like 9-10 compared to almost 300 in Tamilnadu), so in my experience people who cheat; tend to filter out themselves, because people have to compete hard for engineering entrance examinations (like IIT-JEE/AIEEE). My point is - by and large, it wouldn't be fair to paint a average engineer from Bihar by same brushstroke (of course, this is bit self-serving because I happen to have same background).

IMHO the real problem here since a long time is that exams have been demonstrated to be flawed. You can pass an exam and have no idea on the subject. The whole system is flawed, we need a new education system.

The theory is right though, it's the people taking the exams that do it wrong - 'cramming' before an exam, cheating, pretty much doing everything to avoid actually understanding the subject.

Uh huh. Like what?

If he knew he would have probably mentioned it.

Unless he's currently writing the patent documents for it.

How about just having no grades at all? The companies/universities get to decide which applicants to choose by their own methods.

In this case, you need to propose something better in order to be taken seriously. Even companies like Coursera still use exams and quizzes heavily, presumably because they couldn't come up with anything better.

The goal is to test whether someone has learned something. The most obvious way is to ask them a series of questions to confirm that they have learned it.

There are some other obvious alternatives, like having them do a project that would require having the knowledge you wanted them to learn, but those methods don't scale and are just as, if not more, vulnerable to cheating (it is common in Indian universities to hire someone to do your capstone project for you).

Not my field, my propositions would be naive at best. But I know there are plenty of other educational systems out there.

We already have one. Not so new, actually. My undergraduate school[0] was founded in 1970. No required courses, tests, or grades. It's not the only one. Subjecting yourself to this torture is voluntary.

[0]https://www.hampshire.edu/

This analogue is seen through any sort of MOOC that you do. Register for one (especially programming/maths/science-related) and google some of the homework questions. There's heaps of sites where straight answers are given (as in, multichoice options to a question, no explanation).

For some, that seems to be worth their time. I don't even understand.

This problem is certainly not unique to India. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1013239...

This is shocking even as a Indian. In a place where scoring high rather than learning is of prime importance, this is not unbelievable. But parents helping out, this is all-out crazy level.

Bihar like few other north indian states have heavy male dominance. About 90% of relatives I know, want their daughters to finish Matriculation and get married.

The point is - parents put such little emphasis on education of their daughters that girls learn very little in terms of real knowledge by the time - they have to write board exams. Now it is very important to be at least class 10th pass for getting married, so parents put all resources they can to get them to pass (which includes cheating).

Having said that, both boys and girls cheat of course. But from my experience - the society makes it damn hard for girls to excel academically. They have to help with house chores - cooking, cleaning and often are encouraged by parents to skip classes for doing stuff at home.

You can cheat on exams, but you can't cheat when it comes to to produce. You either do, or you don't do it.

It's like stealing. You might get by doing it, a few people might get by, but everyone can't steal for a living. Somewhere, someone has to be making the things that are stolen. And somewhere, someone has to have ideas and knowledge and drive to implement solutions. Everyone can't simply bullshit their way through life. But some people never figure this out.

I read some of the comments here that attribute the problem to the lack of resources or the communal good. I respectfully disagree. The main problem in India is the outdated system.

Most Indian kids have plenty of resources available to them and most parents in India would go hungry as compared to not provide the needed educational resources that were needed by the kids. Also, most Indian kids are super competitive and they have to be when their parents are always asking their rank in class.

Having said that, I don't think it really matters over the long term.

Here is my personal experience:

Growing up in India, cheating was not only accepted but encouraged. I did my high school in India and during the big board exams, I was one of very few students who didn't cheat - out of 200. Why? My dad (and some of the other parents) told us that if we cheated, they will kill us. During the exams, the teachers that were proctoring the exam came up to us repeatedly and asked if we needed help and trust me, it was tempting because you don't want to fall behind someone who is cheating.

There were and are a few factors at play. One is the emphasis on year-end exams. They are the only means of determining the students' performance. No papers to write, no projects, nothing else. Teachers are rated only on the success of their students in these year-end exams. Competition is very high. Parents (admittedly not all) are willing to do anything to help their kids get ahead. If you go to a school during exam time, very often you will see parents standing outside trying to pass notes through windows etc. I have heard of people who hid phones under their turbans in the exams and all kind of other crazy stories.

Now, here is why I don't think it matters. In the short term cheaters scored better but in the longer run, the few of us that didn't cheat came out ahead (small community so I know most of the people and where they are now). In hindsight, I am very glad that my dad didn't allow me to cheat. After that experience, I went to undergrad and grad school in the US and I did see cheating - Indians, Chinese, Americans - everyone cheated, some more blatantly than the others.

It didn't bother me because I strongly believed that in the longer terms those that didn't (and don't) cheat will come out ahead. So far, I haven't seen anything that has disproved that hypothesis.

I don't understand exactly how this cheating method work? How do the students communicate with the people outside?

Shortly after you receive the question paper, the question paper is sent to people outside, either through windows you can see, or by taking 'pee break'. after which they prepare answers and deliver them through windows, or they take it from bathrooms, when taking the '2nd pee break'. I have sat in one of those exams, ;) but it was in Pakistan, nothing dissimilar though. That said, it was about 10 years ago. Now there are very tough 'restrictions' esp., in urban areas, but in rural areas I guess this could be still in practice.

But this does not help any of them, because even witin Pakistan, the degree from the Sindh province (where it is more common), is barely taken seriously, when applying for the Job.

600 students have been expelled over this incident: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/03/20/600-indian-students-...

Well let's not generalize the entire Indian education system by looking at this picture. Cheating during exams is grave offence and I have heard storied how someone was suspended for an entire year for getting caught cheating. This is an extreme case.

If this video is authentic, cheating seems to be one of the lesser problems in Indian education. Instructors are hitting students:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zfC3kbOlQI

The laws are not strict and followed allowing students to cheat and not fear getting caught. If student was banned completely from higher education if they cheated once then no one would cheat.

I got slapped in the face by my 4th grade teacher once. This was back when schools had windows and so there was this kid bouncing one of those red "kick ball" balls on a sidewalk right outside my window. I couldn't concentrate on what I was doing so I got up, went to the window and said some pretty naughty things. My teacher marched right over and laid her hand across my face. My father just smiled when he heard about it and told me I got what I deserved. I was all "yes, ma'am" and "no, ma'am" to her from then on.

Is there no-one monitoring the exam inside the room?

Sigh. Unleash the troll.

Seems like BBC in a mission to defame India. They also seem to forget the problems in their country and focus on others.

See this:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/4...

45000 British students caught. Although this article was published in 2012. Worth noting that, this kind of news are not news at all for BBC.

EDIT: For all the downvoters. You got the right to do it but read this article starting from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi...

BBC was earlier criticized for being Anti-India, Anti-American, Anti-other religion stuff.

Not 45000 British students, but 45000 students in British universities.

Well its got to match OP's title mate.

The difference being that Britain is well known for having a lot of foreign students (many universities range 20-40%), so the set of "students in Britain" is very different from "British students".

The same is not valid for India which, as far as I know, it's not a popular destination for foreign students looking for an university degree.

Note taken Sir. But I cannot edit the title anymore. Sorry!

> Worth noting that, this kind of news are not news at all for BBC.

You really should check before asserting stuff like that. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7466438.stm

@ceejayoz

I should say the same. The article link that I posted was reported in 2012. The link that you shared was from 2008.

And? I linked clear evidence that the BBC covers problems like cheating/fraud in the UK's educational system. You asserted they don't.

What is defamatory in the BBC's coverage here? The photographic evidence looks pretty conclusive.

Well. Did they report the article with clear picture? I dont think so. There is a clear bias.

EDIT: Please read this - for some back story. BBC keeps on doing this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi...

EDIT: Also, read this thread if you have some time. https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2zmk9h/bbc_cut_o...

Claims of bias are not the same as bias. The same Wiki you link to indicates the BBC has been accused of both pro and anti Muslim bias, for example, and a Reddit /r/worldnews thread is pretty absurd as evidence.

Well see who is claiming now Mr.

You are asserting that the comments posted by the people there are absurd? You Sir!

I cannot argue with stupid people. Goodbye.

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