This CAT Was Let out of the Bag...

Prometric, the worlds leading provider of technology enabled testing and
assessment services, announced that it has been awarded an exclusive, $40 mn
contract by the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) to computerize the
prestigious Common Admissions Test (CAT). To efficiently deliver the first ever
computerized version of the exam to over 250,000 Indian students this fall,
Prometric will accelerate plans to further build out its people, services, and
technology infrastructure in India.....

So, read a report somewhere in every newspaper around April 30, 2009, when
the deal (and the fate of thousands of students) was sealed. Fast forward by
five months and the newspapers are still full of Prometric stories. The news,
however, does not read so well.

And we have heard the story many times over. There have been blame games and
there have been serious lapses too. The more than 3,000 personnels trained by
NIIT were, for instance, not quite as trained as NIIT believed (or assured) they
were. Also the biometric scans were not what we thought they were and of course
the hardware at many centers had some serious issues.

But could this have been prevented? Could Prometric, NIIT, and IIMs together
by some tact and more preparedness save the trouble and apprehension that the
MBA aspirants underwent during the CAT-astrophe?

In the answer lies our shamebecause the answer is a resounding Yes! Yes, it
could all have been prevented, nay, un-thought of, had the so-called technology
giants paid technology a bit more attention. And we arent talking here about
state-of-the-art, extremely expensive technology (though the use of such can be
easily justified for something as big as CAT). We are only pointing towards the
technology that is readily available, and that could have easily saved the CAT.

Oh the Virus!

After all the anticipation, thats what we got as an answerthat it was all
done by a virus! Two viruses namely Conficker and Nimda are being held
responsible for the fiasco. Due to this virus attack, nearly 8,000 students
could not appear for the test during the first three days of the ten-day
entrance examination process.

For once, lets say we are very liberal; we are ready to accept and indeed
understand that an unwarranted sudden virus attackwhich the good, and the best
anti-viruses were not able to handle or detectcaused the menace.

But what liberality can one expect when the viruses are more than a year old
and are well known in the cyber space? And every well known, or even a mediocre
open source anti-virus software promises to take care of them?

Ask a Norton, or a MacAfee or even an AVG, if their products are not equipped
to handle a Conficker, and they would stare hard at you, and ask you to stay
updated! The so-called responsible attackerConfickerfirst detected in early
November 2008, is a worm that primarily targets the Microsoft Windows operating
system. Conficker is also known as Downup, Downdup, and Kido. Nimda; also a
worm, was first discovered in 2001; it spreads quickly, eclipsing the economic
damage caused by past outbreaks such as the Code Red worm.

Both these worms can be easily detected, and destroyed by todays anti-virus
packages. So the question remains, why didnt Prometric and its partner NIIT
have minimum security enabled on the computers on which they conducted the exam?
One IT expert pointed out, "It is the height of negligence to have Windows
computers on the Internet without a good anti-virus package."

Ramesh Nava, vice president and general manager, Asia Pacific, Japan and
Africa, Prometric said in a press statement, "Exhaustive plans were developed
and put in place well in advance of the testing window. Unfortunately, the
particular viruses and malware that attacked the test delivery system were not
detected by the anti-virus software at the testing centers."

However, the question that crops up is that why was such a big examination
dependent on the anti-viruses of the testing centers. Why wasnt there any
standardization and anti-virus being used at the central server level? When we
tried to ask Prometricwhat were the anti-virus softwares that were being used,
all we got was silence from their side.

According to Amit Nath, country manager, India and SAARC, Trend Micro, the
whole virus episode could have certainly been handled more efficiently. "There
is no way to constantly detect malware because it is released every two seconds.
But there seemed to have no threat assessment done. By proper measures and
technology usage, this could certainly have been prevented. May be there was a
lack of strong policy," he says.

Up in a Cloud

Gone were the dreams and enthusiasm of a lot many students, when the fiasco
happened. But the cloud could have saved the CAT too. Cyber security expert
Vijay Mukhi is out with his verdict on this one, for anyone who cares to listen.

Had the CAT exam been conducted using cloud technologies, none of the servers
would have crashed and students would not have had to go through such hardships.
I cannot understand why the IIMs shy away from using the latest state-of-the-art
technologies used by the likes of Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon. The cloud
is bigger than the Internet ever was," he fumes.

Yes, the cloud could have saved the CAT. And so could have many other
intelligently used technologies like the biometrics. A student who blogged about
CAT fiasco wrote, "It took about three minutes each, for a person, to take the
fingerprints of two index fingers each, and a webcam photo! Talk about
inefficiency!! We were itching to speed up the process. Since, there was a
separate hardware for fingerprinting and taking photo, it couldve been
pipelined easily. There were three webcams and three fingerprint scanners, but
only one set was used. Apathy? Incompetence? I wonder.. It was already 10:15 am
by the time I was seated, and I was the third person to get in."

That really gives Prometric and NIIT a lot of rethinking.

The other glitch was that some students question papers took forever to
download, something for which the virus has to be blamed again. But arent
technology giants like Prometric supposed to know that if you are using the
Internet, there is always a possibility of virus attack. Did they just forget
that or was it just not taken into account?

Again, as Mukhi notes, the cloud could have been the solution. "Viruses are a
problem only when we connect to the Internet, in this case when you are
connecting to only one server, there is no chance for the virus getting into
your system. While we are conducting a test, we make sure that the user cannot
access anything on the local machine. Prometric by admitting that a virus attack
has taken place has put the future of the exam at risk. What stops one student
for going to the court and saying that the virus changed the answers before it
send the data to the server."

Well, so it seems that technology had all the answers, and NIIT and Prometric
have clearly been left without any.

End of E-education?

Online CAT was being touted as this big bang that will awaken the country to
the potential of e-education. After it went so horribly wrong, is there still
hope for technology in education?

We, being in the business, say yes! Whatever said and done, online education
is the way forward, and the IIMs seemed to have realized that. Despite the
glitches online CAT is to continue and will see another dawn, next year.

All we hope for is that the next dawn is not followed by such articles and
analysis. And come to think of it, it is not all that difficult. All we need is
awareness, as technology answers are already there in the open.

Mehak Chawla

mehakc@cybermedia.co.in