Belling the Indian CAT

The scope of Secure Childhood is not just about Internet safety best practices . It’s also an attempt to mitigate anxiety and stress levels to a certain extent of both parents and teenagers. But what happens when technology itself becomes the source of high anxiety and stress levels. The case in point here is the Common Aptitude Test(CAT) online examination fiasco held for the first time by the prestigious  Indian Institute of Management (IIM’s).

Not only is the reputation of the IIMs in the doldrums but students face loss of a precious year. IIMs failure to transition from paper-based system to the online system has left everyone doubting all such initiatives in the educational field. There are a few questions which needs to be asked:

• What precautions were taken to prevent possible server crash considering close to 2 lakh participants(though in batches and over a few days) were to take the exam?
• The Institute puts the blame on viruses, but isn’t viruses/malware, too familiar a risk to be ignored?
• Wasn’t it expected of a premier institute to foresee such risks and take precautionary steps?

I believe, exposing such a big student community to such a “trauma’ is a serious crime. They would surely have done a dry-run before launching the system. Questions needs to be asked about the ability of the administrator of the online exam (a reputed firm) to conduct examinations on such a large scale.

Noted Cyber expert Na. Vijayashankar has this to say:

“The technology used was primitive in the sense that the entire paper was to be downloaded to the local machine and it was not “Really online”. Ideally, each question should have been downloaded in real time from a network of distributed servers, dynamically balanced for data traffic congestions along with an algorithm which manages the question paper pattern. At the end of each question, the answer should have flown back into the server and triggered the next question download. On the other-hand it is stated that in the current system, the entire question paper was downloaded and re-uploaded after the answer. When the server crashed in the meantime, the entire work was lost. This system also meant that the entire question paper resided in the local cache memory and was amenable for copying.”

A confused student commented:

“Could not complete the exam… I clicked on review… end of the review exited my test. my test ended in 5 mins. I was shocked to see i have completed my exam in 5 min.. no one could help me. Such a painful situation, because of issues i could not complete once in year exam.”

It’s Time for parents to pressurise the authorities and make them answerable.

It’s Time for public-spirited lawyers and parent-child advocates to invoke judicial intervention.

And it’s Time for the Government to wake up and bell the CAT