HYDERABAD: The issue of malpractice during the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) examinations in the city has come to the fore. After the Indian chapter of the Education Testing Service (ETS), a private non-profit educational testing and assessment organisation, spotted that candidates were cheating during the tests, they approached Hyderabad cybercrime police, who registered a complaint on Wednesday.
To find out how the entire racket worked, the ETS put out fake advertisements to lure people, who take the exams on behalf of the original candidates or provide them with answers in the exam hall. They were approached by a man, who assured that he could take the exam on behalf of a candidate as he had been doing across the country for only Rs 23,000.
The ETS carried out a decoy operation in which they gave Rs 23,000 to the fake candidate and asked him to take the examination. They found that the fake candidate would use WhatsApp to send answers to the actual candidate. Even if they were not in the same room, the actual candidate would click a picture of a question and send it to the fake one, who would send him the answer in reply.
ETS had observed such happenings in Hyderabad and filed a complaint with cybercrime police after conducting the decoy operation. Police have registered a complaint and begun the investigation. In 2015, Central Zone Task Force and Central Crime Station had arrested two persons for writing competitive exams on behalf of candidates.
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ETS found that the fake candidate would use WhatsApp to send answers to the actual candidate. The latter would click a picture of a question and send it to the former, who would reply with the answer