Towards foolproof exams

Technology can make the conduct of assessments a clean and just process.

Question paper leaks in competitive exams is a nightmare. File photo

In a country like ours, where seats in top tier educational institutions are relatively scarce, exam paper leaks always make headlines. The prevalence of electronic and online media has just made it more noticeable — for example, images of recent exams in Bihar where parents were seen climbing the school walls to help their wards went viral in social networks.

The menace of leaks is also getting more widespread — spread of communications technologies like IM and SMS have made it easier for perpetrators to copy and share papers in quick time. Question paper leaks in competitive exams is a nightmare for examiners, but they also take an emotional toll on students and add to the agony of deserving candidates who may have missed out.

Leak trail

The source of the leak can be often traced to the path taken by the exam paper from the lockers of the examination board to the printers and then onward to exam centres, where even before distribution, the content would have changed hands many times without any proper audit trace. Therefore, it is often impossible for the enforcement agencies to trace the original source of the crime.

Using technology is a simple fix for this leakage issue but the conservative ‘paper-based’ view of academic examiners is holding educators back. So while the perpetrators are using technology to leak papers quickly, examiners are shy to encrypt and keep papers under a digital secure system. Instead, we still carry the notion that question papers under physical lock and key in an office are the best way to secure high stake mass exams.

There are many participants in the exam process, from the printers to the examiners themselves. One cannot rule out a possibility of leak wherever there is human involvement. In any assessment exercise, there are two teams of logistics support — front-end and back-end. One team is concerned with rolling out the paper once it has been framed while the other takes the responsibility for collecting and compiling answer sheets for processing and evaluation. Both the front- and back-end processes are susceptible to security threats and leakages. Questions can be stolen on the way to the centres, and answer books can be changed or swapped to give undue credit to a candidate. Both processes are dramatically simplified with digital exams. Yet, how that makes exams more secure is the point of this discussion.

Eliminating loopholes

The first goal to secure exams is to eliminate unnecessary human intervention. This starts with encrypting exam content in a way that no one has access to it before the exam starts. Digital exam is about exams taken on computer nodes so that results can be processed very fast. Yet, there is more to it. Digital exams can push exam papers to the exam nodes only minutes before the exam clock starts ticking. The paper can be pushed in an encrypted form to ensure that no leakages happen during transmission. The paper remains encrypted right from the time it is framed to when it is pushed to the screens. More interestingly, even the examiner does not have access to the paper before that moment. The examiner is sent a decryption key to unlock the paper only when the exam is due. No one, from the software host to the people managing the exam have access to the key, since it is system generated. On the candidate end, impersonation would be difficult since each student is tagged with a biometric identity (like fingerprint) to validate his or her presence in the hall. This is in addition to the physical check of a photo-identity done by the invigilators. The biometric detail is then matched with the candidate finally selected. This ensures that the person who has applied for the exam and the one who has appeared for it are the same.

Technology can also intervene to ensure that exam results produced are not forged. Just like equity shares, we are today dematerialising exam results and degrees so that an institution can verify it online against the candidate’s identity. No longer would we require marksheets to be carried along with applications. The cost of technology in terms of digital exams and making exam records online is only marginal, compared to the paper-pencil mode.

Yet, it makes the whole process faster, more efficient and transparent. The Indian economy and the prospects of our citizens are largely dependent on the reliability of the processes we employ in education. Technology innovation has made it possible to conduct assessments in a clean and just manner. Our willingness to embrace it will show our commitment to empower the nation with its best talents.

The writer runs iON, a strategic business unit of TCS that delivers technology-led solutions for SMBs, Educational Institutions and Exam Boards.