Cheating in board exams: Students get creative with mobile phones, Bluetooth

Modern technology is often a subject of debate with many wondering if it is a boon or a curse. But students writing exams will eternally be thankful for technology considering the hi-tech methods they have been using to cheat.

The state of Haryana has seen students getting very creative when it comes to cheating each year. And this time, invigilators found a class 10 boy cheating in his board exams with the help of a mobile phone tucked into his exam cardboard.

The boy is said to have asked his friends to send him answers during the Social Science exams Friday, March 16, and the flying squad got suspicious when the student exam board was a bit thicker than normal.

"A flying team led by board secretary Dhirendra Khadgata caught the student from a centre at Rohtak's Farmana village. The cardboard he was using was thicker than usual, and made the flying squad suspicious," Jagbir Singh, chairman of the board, told Hindustan Times.

"On checking, it was found that the student had put a mobile phone with SIM card inside."

If that wasn't enough, a class 12 student was found hiding a Bluetooth device in his turban in Karnal. While invigilators were suspicious since the beginning, they did not ask him to remove the turban as the move could have blown up to become a religious issue.

"But in the end of the exam, when he tried adjusting the device to converse, we caught him red-handed," Singh added.

Speaking of the various unfair means students had been to resorting to, he said that candidates spent more time coming up with such means instead of using that time to study.

"The board has enough manpower to deal with such students. Recently, at a centre in Jhajjar, we hid live cameras to catch students copying," he added.

Meanwhile, it's not just in India that students resort to cheating during exams with the help of technology.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, numerous devices are sold online in the UK that tiny and easy to hide, and also fit students' budgets pretty well. These devices are wireless and the earpiece is connected to a larger device like a phone that can playback notes.

It is guided by movement and rewinds and forwards notes accordingly.

After the issue came to light the MPs and universities in the United Kingdom believe that students should be subjected to airport-style checks.

"This trend threatens to undermine our exam system if it's allowed to go unchecked and I think the government need to be acting on this because we've seen, increasingly, that the scale of cheating is growing," Neil Carmichael, chairman of the Education Select Committee, told the daily.

Alison Wolf, Baroness of Dulwich and a professor of education at King's College London, said that students may soon be put through metal detectors like at airports as cheating takes away the integrity of exams.