Exam Cheating
According to police on Tuesday, seven students from Hyderabad were apprehended by the LB Nagar Special Operation Team (SOT) for posing as candidates and showing up for the Duolingo Exam Test (DET) on behalf of other applicants. The candidates were competing for admissions to international universities in the USA, Ireland, and Australia through spoofing at Hayathnagar.
The DET is a well-known online English proficiency test that is comparable to the TOEFL, IELTS, and TOEIC. It was created for the internet rather than paper testing and is recognized by more than 5,000 universities globally, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT.
Of the seven students, the police said that two were intermediaries who helped the operation proceed, one was the student who took the exam on behalf of the other four, and four were candidates getting ready for admission to international colleges. According to the authorities, the suspects used to take payments from each student ranging from Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 10,000 in order to obtain a qualifying score and pass the DET exam.
The B.Sc. Computer Science student at Keshav Memorial Institute of Commerce and Science, Kandakatla Praveen Reddy (22), who took the exam in lieu of the four other students, was recognized as one of the arrested individuals.
Throughout the entire process, two other students served as mediators: Banala Krishna (21), a B.Com. student from Avinash College of Commerce, and Trivedhi Harinath (21), a BBA student from Pasha Noble Degree College.
These four individuals, Edavally Aravind Reddy (age 21) and Nenavath Santhosh (age 22), both B.Tech students at Mallareddy Institute of Engineering and Technology; Malladi Naveen (age 26), an M.Sc. Computer Science student at Kakatiya University; and Alakuntla Vinay (age 22, B.Tech student at Teegala Krishna Reddy Engineering College, were all scheduled to take the English exam but conspired with others to impersonate them.
Five laptops, four passports, seven cell phones, and other items were taken from the scene by officials. The material that had been confiscated and the students who had been arrested were turned over to the Hayathnagar police for additional action.
