Karnataka: Students skip exam, answer scripts present

The Board of Examining Authority (BEA) under the Drugs Control Department has discovered a scam in which answers scripts of students who were absent for the Diploma in Pharmacy (D.Pharm) exams appeared during evaluation.

The suspicion is that the answer scripts of the absentee students were filled up later and made available for evaluation.

The BEA detected 397 answer scripts belonging to 104 students who skipped the exams.

Notices have been issued to the absentee students asking them to appear for an inquiry. The BEA has also passed a resolution seeking a high-level probe.

The 'scam' pertains to the first-year D.Pharm annual exam that was held in January 2023. Around 20,000 students from 350 pharmacy colleges across the state appeared for the exams. There is only one government-run pharmacy college.

The D.Pharm is a two-year course, which makes its holders eligible to work under a licensed pharmacist at hospitals and retail stores.

According to sources, a majority of students involved in this scam are from outside the state. "We have initiated an internal inquiry. Further course of action will be decided based on the inquiry report. The matter has been reported to the drugs controller," the source said.

The BEA has a digital system in place that requires details of absentee students to be uploaded within an hour of the commencement of the exam. In this case, the details entered manually did not match the information in the software during verification. "That's when we suspected something fishy. We dug deeper and found that even hall tickets weren't issued to these students," the source explained.

Authorities suspect that the malpractice was done while scanning answer scripts. It is also believed that the erring students paid money to some people to ensure their answer scripts are inserted. Experts from the field of pharmacy suspect the handiwork of "agents" who help private colleges get students from outside the state.