Examinations have always been a nightmare for students. After a rogue virus made them attend classes online and offline for an entire year, they were getting ready to face examinations when the virus began its second rampage with added strength. The authorities have been forced to cancel some examinations and postpone others. Students belonging to the latter category are waiting with their fingers crossed for the revised time-table.
As usual, our prime minister has found time this year also to address students, parents and teachers on the eve of annual examinations. He told them that examinations were just stepping stones to the future, there was no need to panic, and they should leave all their anxieties and stress outside the examination hall. Some students asked him well-rehearsed questions, and his replies evoked a collective nod of heads and cries of ‘wah! wah!’ from the audience.
It is a welcome step that he included parents, the main source of children’s anxiety, among his audience. In a Hindi movie, a student, whose main interest is photography, is forced by his father to join an engineering college. The father has an unfulfilled wish to become an engineer and is bent upon realising that dream through his son. Though not affluent, he even buys a laptop for his son, while the latter would have been happier if he was gifted a good camera.
My grandson, a first-year medical student, told me recently about one of his classmates. The boy fainted at the sight of blood and tried not to go near a cadaver in the anatomy practical class. It is not difficult to imagine who might have dragged him there.
Despite the ideal situation of not giving much importance to the marks one scores at an examination, the fact remains that getting a job or a seat in an institution of higher studies mainly depends on them. He can’t even expect to be called for an interview or other tests if he doesn’t fare well at the examinations.
As a corollary, examinations and cheating have been going on hand-in-hand. In another movie, a goon, determined to become a doctor, blackmails a brilliant guy to impersonate him at the entrance test. As expected, he comes out with flying colours to the consternation of the principal of the college where he gets admission. On one occasion, he even admits to the principal in his Bambaiya Lingo that he has cheated in the examination and challenges him to take action.
During the examinations, we come across reports and photographs about cheating. Answers to the entire question paper are sometimes read out on loudspeakers from outside. At one place, people are seen perched outside first or second-floor windows of examination halls, handing over books and other material to the examinees. Somewhere else the invigilators allow books inside the hall, keeping a lookout to warn them of checking squads.
Though the old methods of cheating at examinations are still in place, innovations have also been taking place. The use of electronic equipments like mobile phones and wristwatches have become convenient tools. Though the authorities now prohibit shoes, long-sleeved shirts, blouses and the likes, and whisk them like criminals, the cheats manage to remain one step ahead.
