Blog #5: These Indian parents climbed a school wall to help their kids cheat on an exam

Recently parents in India have gone to new heights to help their children past standardized tests. Cheating has been common in India for a while but this is an extreme case. These loved ones literally scaled a building to help the students pass their tests. Many of the cheating 10th graders and their relatives were caught and either expelled or detained. Cheating is most common in rural areas because of the lack of job opportunity and fierce college competition. There is also a high drop out rate because they have a hard time passing these standardized tests. A lot of factors that may contribute to people resorting to cheating are embedded within India's school system.

Standardized testing has been a hot topic for years, not only in the U.S. but also in other regions of the world. Here we can see how influential standardized tests can be especially for people in more impoverished areas. People are taking extreme measures to help provide better opportunities for their children. Rural areas are poverty stricken areas and usually these areas are not supplied with adequate education or educational resources. These students are already at a disadvantage and are expected to be able to pass the same test as someone with access to a way better education. An education is one of the very few chances these youth have to escape poverty but even after passing these tests it is a up-hill battle against fierce competition in higher education. This is highly problematic and unfortunately does not only just exist in India but worldwide. Governments should really do more to create better education systems and provide students with adequate resources in order to solve this issue. This is connected to families because students belong to families. If these families are already in poverty then opportunity for upward mobility is very limited. As we know, families in non-Western regions tend to be more collectivist so this means that generations of relatives are often dependent economically upon one another. Access to a college education for just one student could really have a huge impact on the status of that family. Also with so many dropouts due to these standardized tests, what type of labor are these young people susceptible to? Often times exploitative labor.


Indya Perry
3/20/2015 @ 9:17pm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/19/these-indian-parents-climbed-a-school-wall-to-help-their-kids-cheat-on-an-exam/