As someone who has already sat for three board exams and is currently preparing for the last one, arriving at exam halls among other students just as nervous is no longer what makes me anxious about the whole situation. However, there's usually an upsettingly common sight outside these exam halls minutes before the gates open, and that's what sets me on edge. It's the one where you see groups of examinees huddled over and hurriedly reading something off their phones while desperately rifling through test paper solution/guidebooks at hand.

Said something being leaked question paper sets, it's revolting how normalised this practice is even in a surrounding with parents and other adult guardians present, many of whom are seen assisting their children to cheat. It's not only the case with Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and High School Certificate (HSC) exams, but used to be prevalent when Primary Education Completion Examination (PECE) and Junior School Certificate (JSC) exams were around as well, shedding a depressing light on the shockingly young age from which we're exposed to such nuisance.

In a national curriculum board exam where tons of answer scripts are often evaluated with a lot of biases, leaked questions harm all the examinees, especially the ones who have access to them. Firstly, it invalidates someone's honest efforts in academics while unfairly tilting scales towards many who put in none. Not only is that potentially capable of crushing a student's confidence, it also results in skewed grades in times when the questions are complicated/difficult overall.

And the consequence doesn't only stop here, because these very grades, in case of HSC, are an evaluation parameter for university admissions.  Besides, the kids who become reliant on passing the absurd frequency of board exams by buying these questions never learn a better perspective on education, resulting in wasted potential that naturally continue to haunt them for the remainder of their academic life.

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Question leaks: a rot in the core

It's easy to blame the students actively participating in aforementioned circumstance, but they're simply products of a corrupt education framework that's nothing more than a business at this point; and only ever glorifies good grades as a gateway to success.

Instead of using a holistic evaluation process that's capable of providing students with a properly efficient learning experience, our educational institutions have been using exam scores as a sole parameter for one's worth for ages. Most of our teachers promote their tutorial and coaching classes for the same cause, taking it up a notch by fuelling the suggestions-for-common-question-pattern-in-exams culture and oftentimes even leaking question papers from school exams.

In fact, our fascination with perfect grades on a sheet of paper has gone so far, that we've found a way to invent the term Golden A+ for further categorising students who do indeed manage to secure the perfect GPA in board exams. So why is a student, who's already under crushing pressure from toxic expectations perpetuated by a corrupt system that never benefits them, to be blamed entirely for using unfair means that are so readily available?

Unfortunately, other than issuing empty promises in countless conferences and periodically making a show out of taking legal actions against people who perpetrate and sell question papers to students. The education board hasn't really been able to tackle this issue at the root as it keeps happening at some place or the other every time a board exam rolls around. Probably because it's not possible to compensate for negligence towards fixing fundamental errors with performative measures that do nothing, a concept yet foreign to the people in charge.