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How to prevent cheating in competitive examinations
Supreme Court sets up committee to suggest exam reforms
Naresh Khanna
O
n Thursday [10 January 2019],
the Supreme Court of India
suggested the setting up of a
three-member committee led by Info-
sys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and
computer scientist Vijay Bhatkar to
suggest reforms for conducting com-
petitive examinations fairly by govern-
ment bodies. The top court said it would
not vacate the stay on the declaration of
the results of the Staff Selection Com-
mission (SSC) combined graduate level
(CGL) and combined higher second-
ary level (CHSL) examinations held in
2017, in which lakhs of students had
appeared.
The counsel appearing for the CBI,
which is investigating the question
paper leak, said that an FIR has been
registered and suspects identified and
therefore there was no need to cancel
the 2017 examination. At the time, the
apparent leak of the SSC-CGL 2017
examination papers led to protests from
job seekers for several days and the
SSC recommended a CBI probe of the
exam leak allegations.
The Supreme Court bench of Jus-
tices SA Bobde and Deepak Gupta said
yesterday that the three-member high
powered committee would suggest re-
forms to government bodies, which
conduct competitive examinations like
the SSC, as there are several cases of
question paper leaks. Further, the bench
posted the matter for hearing on Janu-
ary 17 and asked advocate Prashant
Bhushan appearing for the petitioner,
to suggest a name besides Nilekani
and Bhatkar for constituting the panel.
Bhushan said he would suggest a name
by next week.
Our view
Since the country is rife with cheating
Nandan Nilekani, Infosys co-founder Vijay Bhatkar, computer scientist
incidents every year in both school and
competitive examinations for employ-
ment, and the courts are openly saying
that the entire system including testing
is ‘tainted,’ it is perhaps appropriate that
they are looking at technology to help
solve or alleviate the problem. Solutions
are of course available although apart
from the will power to implement them,
they require the creation of a secure
education and testing ecosystem that
on the one hand educates and prepares
students and candidates, and on the oth-
er makes its impossible to cheat using
digital printing technology to produce
unique question papers for each student.
Security technology can easily monitor
the examination process as well. of these ideas and technologies.
Case study – Tecknolist and Me-
teksan Digital
We reprint below a case study that
I wrote and published in 2016. It de-
scribes an education and exam system
developed by Teknolist and Meteksan
Digital in Ankara, Turkey that uses digi-
tal technology for both creating study
materials and for the examination pro-
cess. While there is no reaction thus far
from Nilekani or Bhatkar on the court’s
suggestion, it may quite easy for the
proposed high-powered committee to
learn from, adapt and implement some
Pioneers in Education
Meteksan’s use of technology shows
how an entire country-wide school ex-
amination system can administered with
great efficiency and absolute integrity.
Founded in 1969, the Ankara-based
Meteksan is a pioneer in the eld of digi-
tal printing with more than 35 years of
experience in the domain of educational
printing in Turkey.
The company moved from offset
printing of examination booklets to
become the major supplier of an open
and interactive system of teaching and
testing 10 million students across the
country by collaborating with the gov-
ernment. Each printed examination
booklet, identified by a unique id, has
a different order of questions and an-
swer choices. The answer sheet is also
personalised and includes information
about the students as well as their pic-
ture.
Every page of every booklet is
checked by the Hunkeler Web Inspec-
tion and tracking system. The 40 million
examination booklets containing 600
million A4 pages are shrink-wrapped,
labelled, checked using barcodes and
put into patented boxes for shipment to
100,000 classrooms across the country
using GPS secured trucks. To ensure
the integrity and security of the entire
closed loop network, all the examina-
tion classrooms have a wall clock with
a built-in camera.
Meteksan builds its production of
educational materials and secure ex-
aminations around digital inkjet print-
ing from Canon and with inspection,
tracking and paper finishing technol-
ogy from Hunkeler. In its totally secure
plant it runs seven lines of web-fed dig-
ital presses alongside two lines of inte-
grated scanning and finishing modules
that generally output folded and bound
examination booklets.
The Canon Océ CS3500 Twin Sys-
tem, the Canon Océ JetStream 2200 and
a Canon Océ JetStream 1000 are part of
inline configurations that contain Hun-
keler infeeds, web inspection and track-
ing systems, buffers, cutter and drum
collators from Hunkeler and folders
from Heidelberg.
However, the flexibility and dy-
namism of the workflows comes from
the seven Hunkeler online finishing
configurations that can accept printed
webs from the print engines. All these
lines have Hunkeler modules for web
drying, cutting, with drum collating and
integrated gluing also from Hunkeler
and a Heidelberg folder that is used to
produce glued examination brochures
and booklets.
Altogether Meteksan handles 12
petabytes of data each year. After per-
sonalization and formatting, the print
operation is driven by Advanced Func-
tion Files (AFP) that are compact and
fast to RIP. The front end software is
able to talk to the Hunkeler WI6 Web
Inspection System and Tracking Sys-
tem that validates every single page
and assigns the appropriate finishing
steps for it to the collating, binding and
insertion modules. Alper says that for
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