Secondary Exam Results In India Mean An SMS Flood 244
syrinje writes "The Times of India reported that Indian high-school seniors who took the exams conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education sent more than a Million SMS messages within a 11 hour period to query the result database and receive detailed examination results. In addition making the results available to cellphone users, the CBSE has also published the results online at a dedicated web-site . Since the results were announced on the weekend, students would otherwise have had to wait for Monday to get their results from their schools. A spokesperson for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited , one of the operators involved in setting up the SMS result system estimated that they handled 100,000 messages per hour during the day on Sunday and said that "There was no problem in the network due to the heavy SMS traffic and we were able to give subjectwise marks to the students"."
A billion people (Score:4, Interesting)
A one-off hit of 100,000 SMS hits per hour on a site would be newsworthy and probably site-melting just about anywhere else, but in India it's just another day at the office.
If it isn't already, Indian IT infrastructure should be THE reference testing ground for application scalability and load testing. Doesn't matter if it's systems for voting in elections, distributing exam results, traffic information, drought/flood information - if your system works in India, it's pretty much guaranteed to work anywhere else in the world from a load/stress perspective.
Re:Just imagine the traffic... (Score:4, Interesting)
The invigilators and so on are duly paid off.
Re:A billion people (Score:3, Interesting)
Can most Indians afford mobile phones? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been out to India twice for business trips (mostly in Bangalore) and you cant help noticing the contrast between the rich and educated in the tech industries and the incredibly poor people in the same city. Of course there are a lot of inbetween people as well, but the contrast between the extremes is scary.
Considering a mobile phone is an expensive bit of kit (if you get it "free" you pay for it over a few years on calls) you have to wonder if most people can afford a mobile phone.
My sister took the exam this year (Score:3, Interesting)
Incidentally
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=cbseresul ts.nic.in
cbseresults.nic.in was running Microsoft-IIS on Windows 2000 when last queried at 24-May-2004 08:16:18 GMT
*sigh*
This year, election [slashdot.org] result updates were also available through SMS.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
if you get high marks, you get into Engineering or Med. school, i.e. big bukcs. If get low marks you get into "community colleges" i.e. no money. I wish we had something like what India has now back then, that would have saved me teh 4 sleepless nights I had when I heared the results are out in 5 days
p.s.: if you are curious, I got 93% in the examination and got into Computer Engineering. This was 8 years ago.
Re:A billion people (Score:3, Interesting)
Too Open (Score:5, Interesting)
Roll numbers starting with 12 seem to work, and in less than a minute I had the results of 5 students. Complete names, grades, pass/fail status.
This would never fly in the US. There are laws against the publication of this type of data (apparently)
When the SMS is incorrect (Score:5, Interesting)
news.com.au [news.com.au]
Drawbacks (Score:3, Interesting)
Try 100,000 messages in 5 seconds (Score:5, Interesting)
But it's neat anyway. Then again, I thought it was pretty nifty to be able to call me university's automated service and get my results via phone 10 years ago... although I'm sure that little wait between "You have..." and "passed" was put there on purpose!.
Cheers,
-j.
Some more details? (Score:2, Interesting)
That would have been an interesting read (and a sure way to start "my language is better than yours" flamewars
This headline trivia is just...meh.
Incidentally, I was involved in a project dealing with SMS processing. It was the worst thing I have ever seen. Several development teams had worked on it and then quit or burned out. We got the task of trying to save it before the last bits of funding were cut.
An enormous Oracle database with around 50 tables (all with obscure nondescriptive names), most of them were not used anymore but remained because something just might break if you deleted them, they tables did not have proper keys, foreign keys or normalisations. The code itself was several HUNDRED java classes. Most were not used (same story with as with the DB tables, you could not be sure you didn't break anything by removing them). Actually what did all the work in the system was basically a single huge class, 4000 lines or so of procedural code written in java. The whole class was a single main method (no additional methods to speak of), consisting of an infinite loop with nested if/switch/try/catch/loop constructs. Lots and lots of cut and paste, empty catch statements, repeated string comparisons instead of final variables, messages built with String instead of StringBuffer, thread concurrency issues, many short lived database connections without a pool, etc etc etc etc. Almost every bad programming error you could think of.
There were almost no documentation or comments in the code. Once we understood the state of the mess we tried to tell the customer that their demands ("You MUST get this working in a couple of weeks! We told or sponsors we would be able to do a demo!") were impossible, but they wouldn't listen. Our relationship with them did not end well and they refused to pay us money for the time we spent. The project remained a mess of course.
But do you think they got their funding cut? No...becuase it was public sector money, so they got a firm admonishment to do better and kept getting money they wasted. Tax payer money... (Swedish tax payer, so no need to get angry if you live in another country. I you are a fellow Swede, please be furious.) So off they went to hire more consultants who would save them this time.
I'd better post anon this time, I think you can guess why.
So, that's my story of how to do it wrong. I would have liked to see how the Indians did it right.
Don't they protect the privacy of their students? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://cbseresults.nic.in/class12/cbse12.a
it asks for a 7 digit number, and within 3 attempts i found a working one: 1228540
Roll No: 1228540
Name:
SREEJA SURENDRAN
Mother's Name: BHARATHI SURENDRAN
Father's Name: SURENDRAN NAIR
and from their i can continue harvesting information and school scores for my devilish purposes:
Roll No: 1228539
Name:
SNIGDHA THAKUR
Mother's Name: BITHI THAKUR
Father's Name: RAVINDRA NATH THAKUR
I guess privacy isn't that big of an issue to them
Re:India Shining!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Go read up on post-election analysis as to why one of the stalwarts of India's IT boom, Chandrababu Naidu got kicked out by his electorate. Lot more issues which effect Indians than IT and the earlier we realise that and start addressing them the better. At the same time,I do agree that the money coming in because of IT helps in alleviating those basic problems.
But we still have a long way to go before we can say India's Truly Shining.
To answer your last point, I love my country. Its just that having the second largest population in the world causes a lot of bs to filter thru.
Re:and the thoughput is: (Score:3, Interesting)
Submit request: = 300 or so bytes (max message length with latest protocol (3.4) is 254 characters, not 160). With optional parameters the request will bulk up even more since a TLV requires a minimum of 4 bytes per use.
Submit response: Can be up to 81 bytes with the id assigned to the message.
If delivery receipts are supported and requested, you can expect yet another message from the remote that is a receipt that the original message had been received by the handset. That is going to be the size of the header (16 bytes) plus all the required fields for a submit message type (etc etc) with maybe some info in the message body field (add some more bytes to that...). And to add to the fun, that delivery message needs a response, too.
All of that with the size of the occasional ping/pongs and the other commands in the SMPP, the bandwidth can really start to add up. We're still not breaking out fiber here, but SMPP actually is a pretty heavy protocol. And with all the overhead (i.e., many required fields that 99% of the time are set to protocol defaults or NULL), it will eat up more bandwidth than you might think.
And you could always add an XML wrapper to that, and people do...
Hmm, that was pointless. Just felt like typing, I guess.
Re:Just imagine the traffic... (Score:3, Interesting)
In that particular case, it may be a bribery problem. However, given the ubiquity of phones (or worse: highres camera phones) and smart calculators which can communicate via infra-red, etc., high tech cheating becomes a real problem. Go into exam, discreetly snap highres picture of paper, MMS it to a team of accomplices outside, and get the answer back.
Or alternatively, enter short message into calculator, point its infrared diode to the calculator of friend accross the hall, and now work together on the question!
With the number of different phones and different calculators out there today, how will the teacher know which are cheat-enabled, and which are innocent? And in today's world, where phones are part of normal teenage attire, banning phones altogether may not be an option. And banning calculators (in a math exam) is even less feasible. In the olden days, the only thing to worry about where programmable calculators (used to store "notes"), nowadays, you need to worry about comms as well.
Re:and the thoughput is: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
We send the messages thru a 3rd party Internet SMS provider for about 10 Eurocents a piece. It costs a few thousand dollars a year but the students are very happy with it because they receive their results as soon as the prof has graded their work.
We had an angry professor here because he was teaching a class to ~600 students when the results for an important exam were sent out. Of course, the students are required to switch of their phones, but some of them had used their vibra alerts and started to warn the others.
The prof had a very hard time getting the attention of his class again...
X.
Re:Too Open (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:India Shining!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too Open (Score:2, Interesting)
Not just in India... (Score:3, Interesting)
You are either trolling, or are just unaware of how important final-year school exams can be, and how seriously they are taken. This is the case in many countries throughout the world; it's in no way specific to India or to developing nations.
Here in Ireland these exams are the most important you will ever do and count as a fairly pivotal point in your life. How many points you get in your final school exams determine what course you do and in what university, and from that what you do for your career. (There is a fixed number of places on each course, and students compete for entry on the basis of highest exam points.)
People get enormously concerned about the results; other posters have already pointed out the suicide of a girl who erroneously thought she had failed, [news.com.au] and this is only one of thousands of exam-related suicides [cnn.com] in India around this time of year.
So yes, I think students would like to know the results as soon as possible.
This is just like the GRE (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to me that this method is way better than having to distribute based on some centralized service.
Also, competition for graduate school is just as bad as in India. I applied to two schools only to find out that over 3000 had applied to a school that was only accepting 100. If you don't have the numbers, they won't even look at the application.
100 Million SMS messages a day (Score:2, Interesting)
I would have been more interested (Score:1, Interesting)