Hacker Exposes Evidence of Widespread Grade Tampering In India 304
Okian Warrior writes "Hackaday has a fascinating story about Indian college student Debarghya Das: 'The ISC national examination, taken by 65,000 12th graders in India, is vitally important for each student's future: a few points determines which university will accept you and which will reject you. One of [Debraghya]'s friends asked if it was possible to see ISC grades before they were posted. [Debraghya] was able to download the exam records of nearly every student that took the test. Looking at the data, he also found evidence these grades were changed on a massive scale."
in jail by the end of the day (Score:5, Insightful)
This would be true in the US and the UK, and India doesn't even match up to those "high" standards. He'll be in jail because someone with power will be embarrassed by this.
That was a great article.. (Score:5, Insightful)
More for the discussion of statistics than for the really sad excuse for security on those pages..
outsourcing to india (Score:4, Insightful)
this is the type of coding that you get in India stuff done on the cheap and likely to coded to spec with no thinking about how bad of a idea this is.
Re:and how many people just cramed the test (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you seen the curves? They don't even approach a poisson distribution.
Re:and how many people just cramed the test (Score:2, Insightful)
The author answers your objections. First, the missing values didn't have consistent intervals (it wasn't always every 3 points). Second, the grades from 32 to 34 didn't appear in the data. That gap seems unusual. Third, there weren't gaps from 94% to 100%, so it's known to be possible to attain percentages that aren't divisible by three, for example.
Some basic problems with this story (Score:2, Insightful)
"Hacked" means "retrieved from a web server in the way they were intended to be retrieved." The fact the webserver was completely unsecured is, however, worrying.
"Widespread grade tampering" means "statistical evidence that the final grades are not the raw grades, but have been adjusted according to some system as yet unidentified." The nature of the adjustment is as yet unidentified - it could be nefarious, or is much more likely to be according to policy. Pretty much every school system in existence does this.
So the headline should really read, "Student stumbles across results on unsecured website and doesn't understand the grading system." It's not really news.
Re:and how many people just cramed the test (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you trying to mock educational standards by pretending to be someone who failed statistics?
Poisson distributions have to do with frequency of repeatable events over time. You meant Gaussian or Normal distribution.
Re:and how many people just cramed the test (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't you just read the fucking article instead of trying to come up with your own wackjob explanation? He quite clearly explains it:
One of the most common critiques of my theory was this - maybe there were questions with only 3 or 4 mark intervals in all subjects making certain marks mathematically unattainable. My counterargument? All numbers from 94 to 100 are attainable and have been attained. What does this mean? It means that increments of 1 to 6 are attainable. By extension, all numbers from 0 to 100 are achievable.
Let me give you an example. If 99 and 98 were definitely achievable with deductions of 1 and 2 respectively, this means one of two cases - there is a question A worth 1 mark that made 99 occur, and a question B worth 2 maks that made 98 occur, which meant getting A and B both wrong would mean 97 could occur. Case 2 - Question A was worth 1 mark, and question B was worth 1 mark too. The 99 got A wrong, and the 98 got A and B wrong. By this logic, if 97 were not possible, it would mean that there is no other question of 1 mark in the examination or that nobody got a 2 point question wrong and question A or B.
Basically, because 99, 98 and 97 were all attained, then any increment of 1, 2 or 3 points should be possible. The fact that nobody got 80% in any subject in the entire country points to widespread tampering.
Re:and how many people just cramed the test (Score:3, Insightful)
Kinda like yours, except that you likely know even less about the test than he does.
Re:in jail by the end of the day (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably easily meets the definition of unauthorized access under the CFAA. He's actually guilty of a felony under US law.
Worse, he's whistleblowing, and if there's anything the current DOJ likes to punish worse than hacking, it's whistleblowing.
The Author is an Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibilities:
- There is a national cheating conspiracy ...or....
- The test score is not based on assigning a value to each question and adding up those values.
For example, the test could simply be scored as such:
All answers correct: Score 100
Miss one question: Score 99
Miss two questions: 98
Three questions: 97
Four: 96
Five: 94
Six: 92
etc etc
Miss 20 questions: 35
Miss 21 questions: 31
etc etc.
The author makes the ASSUMPTION that the score of the test must be the sum of the value of the questions answered correctly. There is no basis for that assumption. The fact that certain values are not present, and the values 34, 33 and 32 are not present, are likely by design (i.e. don't make people feel like they just missed passing.)
All the author has shown is that India is apparently doing a very poor job teaching critical thinking skills (as evidenced by the author's inability to exercise critical thinking skills.)