Easynomics: Of exam paper leaks, Byju’s, Kota Factory, and Dunki

livemint.com:

₹200 a pop (well, it was the 1990s, things were a lot cheaper then.) Very soon, students started walking out one by one simply because they had only prepared for the questions that had been leaked and no more. On top of that it was a difficult paper—not of a kind where one could just vomit what one had mugged up, which is how most school and college exams were back then. After the exam was over, the explanation offered was that the administrators had come to know that the paper had been leaked and so had changed it to the backup question paper, which apparently had also been prepared and printed.

A few days later a similar story played out with the first chemistry paper, with the final paper turning out to be very different from the leaked one. Another few days later there was an announcement in the Ranchi Express—Ranchi’s favourite newspaper—that both the physics and the chemistry papers had been cancelled. It seems that the second version of the paper—which had led to walkouts in my college—too had been leaked in other parts of the state.

Of course, this meant that the already long examination season became even longer. Which meant that one had to continue preparing amid power cuts and the summer heat. Sometime later, after the exam results were announced and I had scored decent marks, I told my father that the exam papers had been leaked.

And he very calmly remarked that you should have told me, I would have paid for it. And that left me totally zapped, given that I had assumed that a proposition like that wouldn’t go down well with him. But his logic was that if you had prepared well for an exam, a leaked paper a few hours earlier could only be an icing on the cake, because whatever you could have learnt you possibly