By hook or by crook: Assistant commissioner assists daughter in cheating

The board’s vigilance team was harassed by the Malir assistant commissioner

KARACHI:

The Intermediate board examinations have gained notoriety for the use of unfair means. Most candidates, instead of studying for the exams, choose to devise creative ways through which they can cheat the system.

The Board of Intermediate Education, Karachi, (BIEK) promised this time would be different. What they did not realise was that students were not the only ones they would have to fight against.

On Saturday, one of the four-member super vigilance teams visited an exam centre established at the Government Girls' Higher Secondary School in Malir's Murad Memon Goth. "During the inspection, we found three female candidates, who had marked their attendance, missing from the exam centre along with their answer scripts and question papers," Dr Muhammad Wakil Ahmed, head of the super vigilance team, told The Express Tribune. 

The three girls, identified as Mussarat Shaheen, Paras Altaf Hussain Shah and Amna Ghazala Yousuf, were supposed to appear for the botany exam along with 69 other candidates registered at the exam centre. "It was obvious that the missing candidates were filling up their answer scripts at some other place," said Dr Ahmed. "This could not have been possible without the connivance of some of the exam centre's staff."

When the exam centre personnel were asked about the three candidates, added Dr Ahmed, they kept dilly-dallying until their accomplices in this malpractice made the filled-in answer scripts available at the table of the centre superintendent and principal of the school, Prof Maqbool Fatima Sheikh.

Eventually, the vigilance team registered cases of unfair means against the three candidates. In response, the exam centre staff resorted to threatening the members with dire consequences, revealing that one of the candidates, Mussarat Shaheen, was the daughter of Malir assistant commissioner Muhammad Yousuf Abbasi. "They forced us to stay at the exam centre and took our pictures as they pressed us to withdraw the cases against the candidates," said Dr Ahmed.

Later on, assistant commissioner Abbasi himself appeared at the exam centre, along with his security guards, and attempted to persuade the vigilance team to let go. "Students do cheat during the exams; you just need to turn a blind eye to this matter," Dr Ahmed quoted the assistant commissioner as saying.

When the team members refused to budge, the debate turned into an altercation, subsequent to which the assistant commissioner's guards resorted to aerial firing. The vigilance team informed the BIEK's examinations controller, Muhammad Imran Khan Chishti, about their hostage situation.

"Keeping in view the sensitivity of situation, I decided to go there myself and heard gunshots when we reached in close proximity to the suburban exam centre," Chishti told The Express Tribune. "Before I could reach it, the miscreants had, however, fled the scene along with the police personnel deployed to secure the premises."

For his part, assistant commissioner Abbasi, when contacted by The Express Tribune, said that the allegations of the BIEK's vigilance team were preposterous and misleading. "In the morning, I dropped off my daughter at the exam centre and later returned when I was informed that the BIEK's vigilance team was mistreating the female candidates," he claimed.

The BIEK examinations controller, however, refused to accept Abbasi's claims. He said that the candidates' cases have been filed to the BIEK's unfair means committee that will hold its meeting after the conclusion of exams and some of the high school's staff has been removed from vigilance. "The vigilance team has submitted strong evidence against all three candidates," added Chishti. "The inquiry will at least lead to cancellation of the exam in question or debarment from appearing in the intermediate exams for three years, at most."

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3^rd, 2015.