The incident has raised serious concerns and the university has engaged its IT cell and cyber security experts to ascertain how the leak could have occurred.
Vice-Chancellor of the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), Dr Nitin Karmalkar, has clarified that the university’s webmail, and not the website, was hacked. Karmalkar also called the recent arrest of two students from Nashik — in connection with the hacking and leak of second-year BSc Linear Algebra paper on April 27 — “a matter of grave concern”.
The paper leak incident seemed to have occurred during the night, a day before the paper was even sent to the exam centre in Nashik, which indicates that the webmail of an employee of the exam department of SPPU was hacked to obtain the papers. The incident has raised serious concerns and the university has engaged its IT cell and cyber security experts to ascertain how the leak could have occurred.
On Monday, the two arrested students — Adesh Chopde and Chinmay Atravhalkar — were produced in Nashik court in connection with the case. On its part, the university has instituted a three-member committee, which is expected to present its report by Tuesday evening.
“The information is still incomplete as the investigation is still on. However, as per the information received so far, one of the students was using an IP address of Jalgaon and another of Nashik. The two were engineering students, who had hacked BSc papers. The purpose, however, remains to be ascertained. Probe is also on to check if they were involved in any other incident,” said Karmalkar.
After the recent paper leak during an engineering examination, university officials had announced that the papers would be sent to the centres only an hour or two before the examination. Karmalkar said the question papers were “prepared” in the press where they were watermarked according to exam centres and the soft copy was emailed to the examination department at the university. On the day of examination, the exam department officials mail the soft copy to the exam centres, where they are printed and distributed to students.
Since, in this case, the paper leak happened in the night, which is the time when the paper is sent from the press to the exam department, the leak appears to have taken place at this level. Since the login of the exam department can be used to access other papers too, investigations are still on.
Meanwhile, as students are concerned about the possibility of a re-exam, Karmalkar said though the decision would be taken at the Board of Examinations (BoE) meeting, it is likely that the re-exam would be conducted for students registered with Nashik sub-centre. “There are about 200 students in four colleges there. We checked the watermark and details and even if there is a re-exam, it should be limited to them,” he said.