Focus: Why We Adopted The System Of 'Cheating' Today?

By Ragini Khanna in Delhi

A frustrated aspirational society is linked to upsurge in foul exam means. Based on compelling evidence of widespread cheating in the 2015-16 All India Medical Examinations held last month, the Supreme Court recently ordered the Central Board of Secondary Education to conduct a retest. Earlier in March, Indian and foreign media featured prominently parents and relatives scaling school walls and buildings, to pass answer chits to students taking secondary school examinations in Bihar.

Mass cheating is not a recent phenomenon, and began in the 1990s. What were isolated incidents of cheating in the 1970s and earlier are now more organised and widespread in all states of India, and institutionalised in states like Bihar and UP.In 2010, according to 570 teachers in 5 UP districts, more than a quarter of students in their districts used unfair means in the Class X board examination, and an almost equal proportion of teachers accepted money for their collusion in the examination hall or in grading answer scripts.

What is also different now is that in nearly every state there are flourishing small or large scale rackets that involve well-established networks of teachers, schools, examiners, invigilators and other criminals involved in helping dishonest students to pass or perform brilliantly in board examinations.

Cheating has also gone high tech, with answers being relayed to students using devices hidden in their ears. The Haryana police report, based on which the Supreme Court ordered its retest, documents the use of such sophisticated technology in Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal, UP, Maharashtra and Odisha.

Underlying widespread cheating are deep-seated anxieties. Performing well, or even merely passing in India's high stakes secondary examinations, has become increasingly critical to the future lives of young people. Since the 90s, aspirations of poor and lower middle class students and their parents have increased significantly.

However, this aspirational surge of many has not kept pace with acquiring the limited set of academic skills required to pass board examinations.The Annual Status of Education Report, 2014, reported that about one fourth of rural children in India enrolled in Class VIII had difficulty reading a simple Class II level text, and close to half still could not do a division problem.

For these mainly poor and lower middle class urban and rural students, studying predominantly in government and low budget private schools, the goal is often merely to pass the board examinations, or at best do moderately well.Given the unforgivable failure of their schools to provide them with basic academic skills, cheating is viewed by many as the only way to pass the examinations and hope for a brighter future.

Unlike their poorer counterparts, middle class and rich students are the beneficiaries of better schools, superior tutors and coaching classes which prepare them to be good examination takers. Here the goal for many is to score over 90%, if not max the board examinations. Cheating is viewed by some as an option for beating the competition.

This recent significant increase in examination cheating is now a worldwide phenomenon. In China, invigilators at a university entrance examination center used metal detectors to relieve students of heir mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers. Venting their rage against these invigilators, an angry mob of 2,000 parents and students smashed cars and chanted, “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.“

Whatever may be the compulsions to cheat in China or in India, our state and local educational authorities cannot abdicate their responsibility for preventing cheating. They need to act decisively. However, what now makes any solution far more difficult to implement is a sea change in attitudes among parents and students towards the use of unfair means.

Like the Chinese students in Xi'an, the attitudes of many Indian students range from feeling that they would not be able to pass or do well without copying to the more blatant assertion by some that they have a right to cheat. And these attitudes are unashamedly backed by increasing acts of organised violence against anybody, including the police, who attempts to prevent students from cheating.

Given the necessary political and administrative will, it is of course possible to hold secondary school examinations without large scale cheating. In UP, the 1992 Anti-Copying Act brought down the number of examination cheaters significantly for the brief period that it was implemented. More recently in Maharashtra, systematic efforts to curb organised cheating in Latur have also been very successful.

But alongside, the need for improving learning in our government and low budget private schools ­ which would equip poor and lower middle class student with cognitive and other skills required for examinations as well as life outside school ­ has barely been acknowledged, leave alone addressed. Masking this colossal failure, our state education authorities have introduced a series of populist palliatives to increase the numbers that pass secondary board examinations, including turning a blind eye as much as feasible to cheating.

There is a deeper issue of societal values that also need to be addressed. In many schools, cheating in small and big ways begins in the primary classes and is condoned or encouraged by parents, teachers and school authorities. Can we as parents and educators continue to bring up our children to accept cheating as a way of life?