Friday, March 31, 2006

Exam fraud goes high tech


...[The] accused doctors had scanned the entire question paper with the help of DocuPens.

Though the device is small enough to be easily smuggled in, it is also powerful enough to scan a full page in just four seconds, making it ideal for the task.

The accused then transferred the scanned data to their mobile phones using Bluetooth technology, and sent out the paper to their ‘contacts’ through multimedia messaging.

The contacts, sitting in Pondicherry and Madurai, immediately solved the questions and sent the answers to candidates taking the exam at the Chennai and Delhi centres through SMS.

This happened in the entrance test for admission to post-graduate programs in the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India's No.1 institution for medicine.

The report is here. Though the above operation sounds high tech, there is a pretty low tech explanation for how and why it (almost) worked:

Mobile phones were not allowed in the exam hall, but the accused managed to bring them in. Interestingly, the phones also remained unnoticed throughout the examination.

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    You have a nice blog going here!

  2. Abi said...

    Gee, thanks, Naveen!