CUTTACK: Around eight students were on Monday caught for malpractice during the second language English paper of the ongoing annual High School Certificate (HSC) examination.
Srikant Tarai, president of Board of Secondary Education (BSE), which is conducting the Class X examination, said the students were caught cheating during monitoring of the exam centres via the AI surveillance system from the command control room at the board head office.
“These malpractice cases are usual copying by individual students inside the examination hall without involvement of an organised group for messing with process. We have also detected some irregularities and deviations at some examination centres which are being looked into by the examination committee of BSE,” said Tarai.
A total of 5,22,336 students including 5,10,778 HSC, 3,792 Madhyama and 7,766 SOSC are appearing the examinations which are being held at 3,133 centres across the state.
To curb malpractice and ensure free, fair and transparent examination, 70 flying squads have been formed by district education officers (DEOs) and 42 special squads by BSE. The School and Mass Education department has also deployed its own special squads which are conducting surprise checks at the examination centres.
Besides, AI-powered CCTV cameras have been installed in all the 314 nodal centres and 300 sensitive and hyper-sensitive examination centres. A command control room has also been set up at BSE head office to monitor movement and activities of examinees, invigilators and staff deployed for conduct of examination though live-streaming. Any irregularity or mismanagement is being seen or tracked directly from the board office.
In a bid to check paper leak, the BSE has for the first time used watermarks and QR codes in question papers. If a question paper goes viral, the source can easily be traced through the watermark or the QR code.