Why is India a hub for cheating in exams?

Over 70 students and teachers have been booked for cheating during Class 10 and 12 board exams in Mathura in western Uttar Pradesh on Thursday. The students were seen copying and taking help from outside at several centres.

According to officials, 57 examiners including two girls have been booked for cheating. Cases have also been registered against 14 teachers and examination center-in-charges in Valdev, Raya and Mahavan blocks of the district.

There is a lot of talk about cheating. In the past couple of days, you would agree, there is nothing students, mothers, fathers and thinking adults, alike, are thinking, talking and writing about more.

Why do they cheat?

A lot of Indian students are ‘wired’ to cheat. Today, there is no need or want to excel among students. Students and their parents want degrees, at any cost, not education. Students calculate the benefits of such an act against its possible cost and then decide. And given India’s current education system and its fixation with rote learning, there are no effective anti-cheating technologies to minimise cheating in schools, colleges and elsewhere.

The Dark side of cheating

Disloyalty in Exam has long gone beyond the issue of personal ethics. It has become part of the system in many places. Everybody, including school principals, teachers, parents, policemen and students has become part of the cheat enterprise. No wonder attempts to curtail it have fallen flat. When the rule breaker and the rule enforcer collude, cancer cannot be stopped.

In some places, cheating has become so institutionalised that the rates are fixed. In UP, a student set himself on fire after his family was unable to raise money to pay his school principal to allow him to cheat in his class 10 exams.

What the BJP did in UP by making cheating a non-bailable offence seems to be a good solution to this disease, backed by strong enforcement.

Unless the rogue students do not undergo what their seniors went through 24 years ago in Ghaziabad, the diseased system is here to stay!