Fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Payali knew she was doing wrong when she scribbled mnemonics on her hands before entering one of India’s thousands of examination rooms.
However, like many other students, the pressure to pass her annual exams was too intense and so she used the memory prompts to cheat.
Failure would jeopardize her chances of climbing out of poverty which had long shackled her family.
Photo: AFP
“There’s too much to memorize and pressure from parents, teachers and even competition with friends,” said Payali, who did not want to use her last name, as she walked home from school in New Delhi.
“If you can’t handle it all, you fail,” said Payali, now 17 and one year from graduation.
Using methods ranging from old-fashioned crib sheets to high-tech spy cameras, cheating is common in India, where government schools place an extraordinary emphasis on exams in all grades, according to experts.
Television footage last month showed dozens of relatives scaling school walls to try to give information to students in northern Bihar, one of India’s poorest states.
Staff and police officers were seen ignoring relatives who passed cheat sheets through the windows of exam rooms.
The footage made international headlines, forcing embarrassed authorities to round up parents and issue them with fines, but education experts said they were unsurprised.
Cheating underscores the poor state of many of India’s schools, which are overcrowded and underfunded, their classrooms packed with children learning mostly by rote.
Arjun Dev, former head of an Indian government body that plans and promotes schools, said an “endless overemphasis on memory-testing exams” has stubbed out creativity and logical reasoning.
“The system has failed students. It doesn’t equip them with necessary qualifications and then overplays the importance of exams, whose certificate is hailed as the ultimate ticket to success,” he said. “Until the system changes, cheating will remain a common feature during exams. It’s as simple as that.”
Anxiety levels soar in the months leading up to the exam season — this year’s has just ended — with students pinning hopes on high scores: the only way to get a decent job or a place in college.
With the system stacked against them, many poor families feel compelled to do whatever they can to help their child get a foothold in a better life. This — along with India’s all-pervasive culture of corruption — have been largely blamed for the cheating.
Rakesh Kumar, who left school in 2008, makes no apologies for his efforts, including smuggling notes into the exam, hidden under his watch and in his socks.
“There weren’t many teachers or chairs, sometimes no electricity. I lost interest slowly, so I didn’t study,” said Kumar, from Bihar.
“Sometimes the invigilators wouldn’t care much, they turned a blind eye ... that helped. Honestly, I had no choice. I had to cheat,” said Kumar, who earns 25,000 rupees US$400) a month running a store in east Delhi selling traditional Hindu ayurvedic health products.
For better-off students, cameras hidden in buttons, ties, pens and bras accompanied by Bluetooth technology are available online and in shops tucked away in the backstreets of Delhi’s old quarter.
“Sometimes kids come by to check out the items,” shopkeeper Rocky Binwal said, adding that his policy is “not to ask” questions.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who swept to power in May last year, has called for a paradigm shift in education — from rote learning to modern, skills-based training.
“Our education apparatus cannot be one that produces robots. That can happen in a laboratory,” Modi said at a university event in December last year. “There has to be overall personality development.”
Indian Minister of Education Smriti Irani has vowed to increase spending on education from nearly 4 to 6 percent of GDP and pledged a new national policy by December that will link “education to employability.”
Experts applaud the promises, but fear for the millions of young people on the verge of pouring into India’s job market.
Indian education research group Pratham published a survey in January that found half of 570,000 students surveyed could not read simple sentences or solve easy arithmetic after six years of schooling.
India has a literacy rate of 65 percent, lagging far behind China, where the rate is 95 percent.
“We have students who don’t know the basics and that is frightening,” Pratham communications head Ranajit Bhattacharya said.
Anand Kumar, who teaches math to students from poor families in Bihar, said plenty of students were working hard against the odds, rather than resorting to cheating.
In a blog on the NDTV channel Web site shortly after the Bihar scandal, Kumar said teachers needed to work harder to help neglected students.
“Also, there needs to be a sense of shame that accompanies cheating — and not just when the person gets caught. It should not be considered the done thing,” he said.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed