Sify takes bankers' exam online

On January 18, 2004, the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance (formerly Indian Institute of Bankers) broke from its past and created history of sorts.

The 76-year old institution allowed close to 20,000 of its banking professional members to take two of its important exams online.

The Chennai-based, internet service provider, Sify Ltd, became part of history too by developing this solution for IIBF and running it across 390 of its Iway cyber cafes from 15 centres across the country.

The 23 strong governing council of IIBF gave an unanimous go ahead to take this safe and calculated risk of stepping into the cyber world.

The mission, as of now, has been a resounding success, with 90 per cent of the candidates giving a positive feedback. This is despite the fact that only 40 per cent had passed the exams.

The banking industry in India, as on date, employs close to one million professionals, 80 per cent of whom are members of IIBF.

As a part of its effort to improve professionalism in the Indian banking industry, IIBF conducts over half a dozen exams every six months covering over 100,000 candidates from all over the country. Banking professionals, who wish to raise up the ladder that come with fatter pay cheques, clamour to take the IIBF exams.

IIBF's CEO, R H Sarma says, "The biggest challenge we faced was converting the question paper format from descriptive one to an objective one. This took over six months to complete."

And this is just for two examinations, Diploma in Business Finance (DBF) and Junior Associate of Indian Institute of Bankers (JAIIB).

P J Lonappan, deputy CEO, IIBF says, "Through a tender we looked at many vendor to deliver this solution. Sify turned out to be only ones who remotely met our demand." NIIT, Aptech, Sify and Blue Shift also bid for this contract.

Sify's presence in the cyber café space with over 1,500 Iways and its ability to deliver a secure engine to generate the question and immediate results proved to be winning formula.

Dipan Bhattacharyya, vice-president, enterprise solutions, Sify says, "We spent over five lakh person-years to deliver this solution for IIBF. This was followed by eight weeks of preparation, that included two mock tests by Sify and IIBF to ensure that the system was stable and delivering the desired results."

Sarma's vision is to make all of IIBFs exams available 'on tap.' He says, "In the next six months to one year, we want to make our examinations available anywhere, anytime."

Bhattacharyya adds, "IIBF's mandate is not to conduct exams. Their resources are better used in improving the quality of professionals through research and professional training. This was an additional impetus to ensure that the professional body does not waste its energy in conducting exams per se."

The modus operandi of IIBF's online exams have some interesting features. For one, no two candidate get the same paper. Which means your friendly neighbour cannot whisper the answers to you.

Two, when the exams are on, the PC in the Iway, runs only the exam module, meaning, you cannot hop to www.google.com to get some help!

Photo identify cards and hall tickets remove the chance of impersonating. And no random ticking of answers is possible.

Negative marking for wrong answers ensure this. All this was not possible under the descriptive answers model.

Kothamasu Sivarama Rao, a candidate from Bangalore in his feedback says, "Dear Sirs, since the negative marks (were) introduced, the qualifying marks can be reduced to 40. It is very good because result will be known immediately and enough time for preparation for next exam in the case of fail thanking you sirs, yours faithfully." This feedback was made available to this paper by Sify.

A few others have complained about the limited number of number cafes that run this exam.

IIBF officials do not rule out the possibility of having a multi-vendor model, where Reliance Web Worlds can be part of this effort.

Reliance had not bid for this but might well be doing it next time IIBF floats a tender. Sify officials says that this was only an experimental effort.

"Reach of PCs or Iways are not constraints here. We can scale up to any level, hire PC, load the exam modules in a matter of few hours," Bhattacharyya defends.

Lonappan says, "We have run this exam for the last four Sundays. We will this for one more Sunday. At the end of this we will collate all the results and feedback and take it to the governing council. The council may decide to make a full switch over to online format, run both old and new systems in parts or revert fully to the offline model."

The third option, though Lonappan adds out of caution, does seem remote. Reality seems to point more towards the first or second option happening. If not in the next six months or even one year, Sarma's vision of 'exams on tap' does not seem a mere pipe dream.