A recent case of cheating by students taking Pakistan’s Medical and Dental College Admission Test (MDCAT) serves as a cautionary tale about the dual nature of technology.
Medical admission tests in Pakistan are traditionally well known for their transparency and meritorious selection of the few thousand students, among hundreds of thousands of applicants, to be permitted entry to the nation’s prestigious medical colleges.
However, that reputation has been tarnished in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, which includes cities such as Peshawar and Mardan, where reports have drawn attention to the alarming use of covert Bluetooth devices by dozens of the 45,000 students taking the MDCAT on one day in September. These devices, which apparently incorporate miniature earpieces to receive answers and assistance during the exams, were reportedly sold by unknown actors for a hefty sum of approximately $10,000 (8,300), with the promise of enabling the students to achieve scores exceeding 90 per cent.
Sure enough, the number of students receiving that score leapt by 580 per cent this year. No other score range saw a change of more than 25 per cent either way. And this in a year in which the overall pass rate (those scoring 45 per cent or more) declined by nearly five percentage points to 63.5 per cent, implying a likely increase in the rigour of the test. The remarkable surge in students scoring above 90 per cent defies the expectations of a normal distribution and statistical...
Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMibGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRpbWVzaGlnaGVyZWR1Y2F0aW9uLmNvbS9ibG9nL21lZGljYWwtZXhhbS1jaGVhdGluZy1wYWtpc3Rhbi1kZW1hbmRzLXRlY2gtYW5kLWN1bHR1cmFsLXJlc3BvbnNlc9IBAA?oc=5
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.