It is exam season in India, that anxious time of year when more than 10m students take the national tests required to complete secondary school — widely seen as the gateway to a brighter future. These highly competitive exams are supposed to be a fair, transparent method for awarding India’s 600,000 publicly funded university seats to the best and brightest. But recent years have seen a mounting outcry over a thriving exam-cheating industry, in which students, and their collaborators, seek to game the system.
“I’m very, very worried about the impact this has on the moral fabric of children,” the head of KPMG’s Indian education practice, Narayanan Ramaswamy, told me. “The respect we have for the learned community and teachers will go down. We will not be able to trust when somebody says, ‘I am a graduate.’ Over time, we will have a society of mediocrity.”
Cheating in college admissions, or accusations of it, is not new in India. Back in 1892, court records show, a student called Rakhal Dass Ghosh who wanted to take the University of Calcutta entrance exam was accused of forging his headmaster’s signature on his application.