Board exam panics: UP government cracks down on mass cheating, it must stop mass dropouts next

In the first four days alone, a record 10.4 lakh examinees have skipped the Uttar Pradesh board exams, 6.2 lakh from Class X and 4.2 lakh from Class XII. That’s a staggering 15% of the students who registered, with the number expected to rise higher by the time exams end on March 12. This has followed on the heels of a government crackdown on the education mafia, whose toolkit includes everything from impersonation to leaked question papers. While cracking down on mass cheating cannot address pervasive student anxieties about board exams, it’s a welcome and important measure. Because cheating hollows meritocracy from the core, punishing the hard-working and truly first-class students.

Deputy chief minister and secondary education minister Dinesh Sharma hopes that the crackdown will help the UP board get back its lost brand value. This is not just an issue of morality. Without basic levels of fairness and trust, no economy can emerge into excellence. For example in neighbouring Bihar the employment and business environment has surely taken a hit from endemic education scandals, whether it’s schools getting their affiliations by improper means or students purchasing top-scoring certificates for a fistful of lakhs.

It’s etched in national memory how a sting operation exposed Bihar topper Ruby Roy declaiming that political science, a subject she supposedly aced, is about cooking. Over in Madhya Pradesh a higher-level educational scandal saw widespread rigging of the state’s professional exam board, Vyapam. Without a concerted choking of such corruption, including stringent prosecution of the accused, crooks will continue to exploit India’s demand-supply mismatch in education and employment. After all students chase high marks in board exams only to chase too few college seats, after which the pipeline gets further narrowed to even fewer jobs.

But it’s equally important to address why so many students feel so ill-prepared for the board exams. Learning outcomes of junior classes are disgraceful. Not just in UP, students everywhere are stressing over the March 5 return of the CBSE Class X board exam. So the challenge is to both crush the education mafia and make sure that students stay in school until Class XII. Instead of replacing mass cheating with mass dropouts in Class X year after year, fix the teaching and learning processes so all students get a fair shake.