Comment by iamshs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamshs | Hacker News Reader

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The guy is playing the press, and enjoying the limelight on him by terming his data mining process as hacking in the opening paragraphs complete with juicy quotes, and this is why this article does not even mention the anomalies in the testing but rather concentrates on the cyber attacks.

On his results: http://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7563466e4810af140bb712b...

Now this data distribution looks suspect to tampering. I will not pass judgements though without knowing the format of the papers. Besides, we do not know if indeed he actually fetched data for all the students and did not miss anybody, since he is relying upon his manual boundaries while scraping data. How informed are those boundaries is not known. ICSE schools are not normal run of the mill schools, they are populated by rich kids who can afford extra help and are kind of smart. Their English curriculum is reputed to be strong, hence the strong distribution towards high end. I am also making assumptions, but I do not have full data to make informed inferences.

The article is mostly about the data he gathered, not the methods he used to acquire the data. I agree with you that it is hard to draw conclusions from his analysis without knowing more about the tests and how they work, but that is exactly why I was hoping the comments on HN would provide some clarity in this area rather than a debate about whether what he did was "hacking", which is wholly uninteresting as far as I'm concerned.

>> ICSE schools are not normal run of the mill schools, they are populated by rich kids who can afford extra help and are kind of smart.

Around a decade back, When I joined pre university college. ICSE/CBSE fashion was its highest. I remember our college principal had put them all in a section and they often got the best faculty and privileged treatment. It was almost like they were sort of something special, so special care needs to be taken to handle them, As though they were some exotic orchids. And we were some garbage thrown across the road which would turn fertilizers for the large plants.

By the next year it was clear, they were a total disaster. In fact their only distinguishing factor was they could speak neat English, good clothes and a tremendous sense of elitism.

Its just these highly bloated syllabi, about teaching kids all sort of advanced subjects which they understand nothing of. Ultimately they learn less than others.

Agree with rich kids and English part totally.

Besides, it's a tradition to get high marks in an ICSE schools in India. So much that if you pass your 10 from an ICE school and go to a CBSE school for admission and have 94% marks then the kid who has 89-90% from a CBSE school or even lower from a state board school might be preferred. It was true in 2001-2003 and was till I kept track, not sure now.

Their system has(had) a lot of marks in the hands of school authority rather than the board and those marks were(are) very generously handed out.

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